Dissident Pregnancy Detection Models for Reproductive Justice

• In Event: Regenerating Algorithms

Abstract

The "Target teenage pregnancy" story (Duhigg 2014) – in which coupons from Target informed a father that his teenage daughter was pregnant before she did – has been told and retold numerous times (including, recently, in my own book Data Feminism, co-authored with Lauren Klein). What we know about the pregnancy detection model, developed by Target employee Andrew Pole, is that it used the purchase of approximately twenty-five common products, including unscented lotion and large bags of cotton balls, that, when analyzed together, provided an estimation of pregnancy status. It also calculated expected due date. Target operationalized the model as an algorithm and sent the possibly-pregnant customers coupons for baby clothes and cribs.

Under data regimes motivated by surveillance and selling, the pregnant female body is alternately ignored – as in the case of maternal mortality data (Center for Reproductive Rights, 2014); pathologized with prenatal testing (Rapp 2004); or, in the Target case, regarded as a financial incubator of future purchases. Janet Vertesi (2014) described the difficulties of hiding her pregnancy from data-driven corporate platforms eager to persuade her towards future consumer allegiance.

So in this current configuration of data power, what (if any) more emancipatory possibilities exist for pregnancy detection algorithms? For the purposes of this panel conversation, I will create a visual/performative representation of what we know about the pregnancy inference algorithm authored by Andrew Pole for Target, and extend it into a near future in which Roe v Wade has been overturned.

References:

Duhigg, Charles. (2012). "How Companies Learn Your Secrets". New York Times.

Center for Reproductive Rights. (2014). Reproductive injustice: Racial and gender discrimination in U.S. health care.

Rapp, R. (2004). Testing women, testing the fetus: The social impact of amniocentesis in America. Routledge.

Vertesi, Janet. (2014). "My Experiment Opting Out of Big Data Made Me Look Like a Criminal" Time Magazine.

Author

• Catherine D'Ignazio, Massachusetts Institute of Technology