Digital geographies of miscarriage: A ‘sister‐ethnographic’ approach to pregnancy apps and loss

Abstract

Pregnancy apps have become a popular healthcare tool with millions of users worldwide. While branded as inclusive, they nevertheless normalise a particular pregnancy journey: one culminating in birth. Knowing that pregnancies end for various reasons – with one in five resulting in miscarriage – we seek to challenge this narrow framing. Deviating from existing literature, our paper explores the emotional geographies of pregnancy apps when birth is not the outcome. Set through a series of ‘app annotations’ by two sisters navigating pregnancy loss, our paper explores how a leading app was intimately encountered. Drawing inspiration from graphics literature, we advance a new method and activist tool that centres the body – and particularly embodied loss – in digital debates. In so doing we hope to turn geography's ‘digital turn’ towards a more creative set of tools, heeding feminist calls to engage technological intimacies. Vitally, this work illuminates those lives (and losses) systematically excluded – often in the name of life itself.