Like a lot of millennials, Clarkston’s Amy Pittman tracks her life with apps. So when she got pregnant she naturally signed up for one that would show her the progress of the being growing inside her.
A month later, Pittman miscarried. She terminated her online pregnancy but seven months later, just a few weeks before what would have been her due date, a package of baby formula appeared on her doorstep. The app company had shared her information with other companies but didn’t pass on the final conclusion.
Pittman, who works as a reimbursement analyst at Tri-State Memorial Hospital in Clarkston where she lives with her husband, Jesse, found it oddly comforting that her baby lives on through the internet. The New York Times published her poignant essay about the experience, “The Internet Still Thinks I’m Pregnant,” in its Sept. 4 edition.
“I wrote it as a way to think through what I was feeling. It was strictly therapeutic,” she said in an email. While Pittman has a degree in writing she hadn’t written since college, she said. She sent the essay to the Times as a way to finish processing the experience.
“They accept about 1 percent of submissions so I fully expected to either hear nothing or get a denial. The editor contacted me the next business day and they published it two weeks later. It's been a weird experience, let me tell you.”
