12/08/2025
The leading cause of death in mothers during their first year following pregnancy is suicide and overdose. It’s not just due to postpartum depression; one in three mothers has to deal with the mental impact of traumatic birthing experiences, and one in five suffers mistreatment from their obstetric team. Other mental health struggles can also arise during the difficult and vulnerable process of physical recovery and the mental toll of childcare.
The struggles of new mothers are worsened by “bounce-back” culture, a societal pressure on women to return to their pre-pregnancy state—physically, professionally, and emotionally as quickly as possible. Bounce-back culture originally manifested as a strategy by the first women entering the workforce. By downplaying the effects of motherhood, they could mitigate the motherhood penalty, a persistent phenomenon of women being hired less often and paid a lower salary once they become mothers.
It certainly doesn’t help that society does not adequately make space for the support new mothers require. Between 80 and 90% of new mothers experience loneliness and social isolation, left at home alone with their baby after birth. Their partners return to work after an average of 1-2 weeks, which is often not even enough time for postpartum women to be able to walk properly if they’ve had a cesarean section or a birth injury. There is also the financial and professional pressure that time off from work brings for mothers on maternity leave. Such conditions don’t promote the idea that a mother should be taking time for their recovery.
But postpartum recovery, physically and mentally, is a taxing and challenging process that realistically takes years rather than weeks. Under the guise of empowerment, the idea that this process should be achievable quickly and gracefully is harming mothers. It has also led to a predatory market of products designed to help women speed up the “snap-back” process.
The specific pressure for new mothers to lose weight quickly after giving birth has given rise to a dangerous market of products and ideas that can make recovery more difficult and existing health conditions worse. There’s a market for belly binders, abdominal compressors that can cause pelvic organ prolapse, a condition that affects up to 90% of postpartum women, to worsen.
As semaglutide GLP-1 medications such as Ozempic and Wegovy become more mainstream, there’s the suggestion by some that these weight-loss drugs could be the solution to weight gain from pregnancy. Olympian Serena Williams recently appeared in a GLP-1 commercial for the company Ro, in which she stated that after having kids, “my body was missing something it needed” and “the answer was GLP-1s.” This is despite the several incoming studies that show potential long-term consequences of using GLP-1 medications in cases where there are other options available. This is especially so for new mothers, as the appetite-suppressing effects can worsen common nutritional deficiencies acquired during pregnancy and breastfeeding.
Plenty of other companies sell supplements and “hormone-balancers” marketed towards mothers. There is a fine line here, as some dietary supplements are medically recommended and useful for prenatal, postpartum, and breastfeeding women. However, when pseudoscience meets predatory marketing tactics, such as in the case of many alternative medicine products that encourage self-diagnosis and self-treatment of postpartum issues, things can get dangerous. While these so-called “natural remedies” are unregulated, they can have real effects, and their long-term safety for use by mothers experiencing perinatal issues has not been examined.
Products like these often sell the idea that there is something wrong with postpartum women; that they’re tired because their body is unbalanced or missing some miracle cure, not because they’re lacking the rest time or support that they need to recover. The products implicitly promote the insidious idea that women should get back to looking and feeling 100% as soon as possible after having a baby. It also places the onus on the likely already overburdened mother to fix themselves swiftly and silently.
Some OB/GYNs have seen women cause themselves physical injury by exercising even just a week postpartum to achieve this. Interestingly, although there are quite a few postpartum fitness apps, many of them do not offer any kind of safety monitoring information or tools for the women using them.
Not only that, but by current societal standards, there is an expectation that women should return to some pre-pregnancy state. This belief is evident in a statement from Dr. Krutsch, director of the Texas Tech Infant Risk Center. She says that there is an “overwhelming” interest in semaglutide GLP-1 medications from lactating women who “want to have their pre-baby body back.” Realistically, this is an unattainable goal for many and a reality that is not often discussed.
Up close, the mindset is toxic and ridiculous: pregnancy and childbirth can permanently change the composition of a person’s body. Yet, so much marketing towards postpartum women suggests that they just need to work harder to get back to some “pre-baby” form of themselves. It implies that not returning to your pre-pregnancy appearance is a personal failure, instead of recognizing that this expectation is unrealistic. Bodies change, and as physiotherapist and postpartum fitness coach Surabhi Veitch put it, “we don’t go through puberty and expect our bodies to look like they did when we were nine or 10.”
Because of how prevalent this “bounce-back” messaging is, how ingrained it has become in Western culture, it is critical that engineers designing technologies intended to help postpartum women examine their products for these biases. Especially as weight loss tools and medications continue their development, it is the ethical imperative of the engineers behind them to consider how these technologies are inadvertently contributing to the dangerous “bounce-back” mindset and the postpartum mental health crisis.
Just because a market exists does not mean that it’s ethical to exploit it; selling a product that people will buy is not in itself virtuous, and exploiting mental health conditions and toxic societal pressures to coerce people into buying a product is certainly not.
Creating products that shame new mothers into trying to look better or even rush themselves to feel better after childbirth needs to be stopped. This necessitates a stricter culture of mindfulness and compassion when designing and promoting everything from apps to medications designed for postpartum women. What might appear as a tool for struggling mothers could be doing more harm than good by fueling the underlying biases of the designer.