Advancements in the technologies and support available to postpartum women are essential, and many new technologies designed for mothers are promising to hasten their physical and emotional recovery. While this may seem a noble goal on the surface, many products marketed to postpartum women are hindering rather than helping their recovery by feeding into an increasingly twisted societal ideal of what postpartum recovery should look like. It is the ethical imperative of engineers to consider how their technologies are contributing to the dangerous “bounce-back” culture directed at postpartum women and the maternal mental health crisis.
View More Selling the Problem, Selling the Cure: Bounce-Back Culture and its Toll on New Mothers