Bloomlife Pregnancy Tracker and the Role of Data Discourse in Repro-Tech Marketing

Dados Bibliográficos

ID6453585
AutoresMadeline Levey (0009-0006-2952-4846, Florida State University, autor correspondente)
Ano2025
Volume15
Fascículo2
Páginas224-242
Data de publicação2025-07-02
Peer ReviewedSim
Open AccessSim
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoSomatechnics (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 2044-0138 • E-ISSN: 2044-0146
EditoraEdinburgh University Press (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.3366/soma.2025.0461
OpenAlexW4411956911
IdiomaEN
Citações recebidas1
Referências citadas19

This paper examines the case of the Bloomlife Pregnancy Tracker technology, a ‘smart pregnancy wearable’ and smartphone application that is intended to monitor contractions and create ‘peace of mind’ for pregnant people approaching birth. In this paper I analyse the role of biomedical pregnancy data collection and its discursive impact on the spatial power conditions of risk, health, and surveillance. I argue that Bloomlife uses pregnant people’s bodies as spatial sites of data extraction and capital accumulation by implementing discursive marketing strategies that position their consumer technology as necessary to solve structural maternal and fetal health problems. Through a critical discourse analysis of Bloomlife’s marketing materials between 2020 to 2022, I identify three themes that illuminate how Bloomlife’s discourse situates the pregnant body as being in need of technological intervention: normality, biopotential, and risk. The ways that Bloomlife positions the pregnant body alongside their consumer technology indicates alarming futures of the biocapitalist extraction of life and reproduction. This research highlights how the discourse of a reproductive wearable technological device can illuminate these biopolitical strategies of technological solutionism that are increasingly common under biocapitalism

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