Thirty years ago, my mother didn’t have a birth plan. She ate what was put in front of her. Rested when she was told to. She trusted the women who’d done it before her and the doctor who’d done it a hundred times that week. Nobody asked her what she wanted from the experience.
Not me, though. At last count, I have a pelvic floor physiotherapist, a prenatal fitness trainer, a child nutritionist whose weaning philosophy I’ve pre-read even though I won’t need it for months, and an ob-gyn I trust completely (who I sometimes cross-reference against Instagram). I’m informed. I’m also exhausted in a way that has nothing to do with the third trimester.
Your mother’s generation simply didn’t know this
Dr Tanvi Desai Wadia, an obstetrician and gynaecologist, sees a stark difference in her patients now and those she saw even a decade ago. They know their hormone levels before she’s ordered the tests. They’ve tracked their cycles for months on an app. They’ve researched which form of folic acid their body absorbs best.
“The knowledge base they arrive with would genuinely have been unusual even in a medical colleague a decade ago,” she says. They come with printed notes, questions organised by category, sometimes a voice memo. Less “tell me everything is fine”, more “show me the data and help me interpret it”.
Rinie Gupta, a newborn, baby, and toddler sleep consultant based between Singapore and India, sees the same shift from her side of the table. Parents arrive having already put their problem into ChatGPT. They know about sleep schedules, sleep training, wake windows. They want to understand the why. “Mothers of the previous generation relied on the knowledge of their own mother or the other women in their community,” she says. “Mothers of this generation have knowledge from experts all over the world, from different countries, and that’s really allowing them to raise their children very differently from how they were raised.”
This is, unambiguously, good. Women understanding their own bodies, pushing back on vague reassurances, and demanding the data—that’s what autonomy looks like. And yet, something else has moved in alongside the knowledge.
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Dr Wadia identifies the current conundrum: “The access to information has not, on the whole, made patients calmer. If anything, the more informed patients are often the more anxious ones, because they know enough to know what can go wrong.” There is an expert for everything. And the experts are good. The problem is the industry that’s grown up around the gap they fill.
Dr Vanshika Gupta Adukia, founder of Therhappy and a pregnancy, childbirth, lactation, and pelvic floor specialist, describes what happens when social media gets hold of a clinical concept. Everyone suddenly knows about the pelvic floor. Everyone is talking about activating it, strengthening it, doing their Kegels. However, for some women, the pelvic floor doesn’t need activation—quite the opposite. It’s already overactive, locked in a state of constant tension, and what it needs is to learn how to let go.
“There are a lot of people who are just trying to post content without actually being trained in it, and they have started teaching patients things that everyone doesn’t need,” she adds. Women end up with specialists like Dr Adukia working on “reversing exactly what we didn’t want”.
The information is out there. It’s just not always the right information for you, specifically, right now.
Sanchita Daswani, a child nutritionist, sees a version of this play out in her practice too. Parents have absorbed every weaning philosophy, understood the evidence for baby-led approaches, made peace with the shift away from “finish your bowl”. They’ve done the reading. And they’re still quietly panicking because their baby didn’t eat enough today. “We have to remember that our kids are human beings,” Daswani says. “They are not going to love all foods.” The knowledge tells you what’s optimal. It can’t tell you to relax about it.
Mrinalini Bakshi Sengupta, a pre- and postnatal fitness trainer, sees the same current running through her work. Women come to her now wanting strong pregnancies, smoother postpartum recoveries, and the language and community to understand what their bodies are going through. Postnatal recovery has become its own category. “We realised that to be a present mother, we need to fill our cup as well,” she says. That’s a great reframe. It’s also, if you’re not careful, just more things to do.
The algorithm is the new MIL
Here’s the thing about the new authority. The old one—your mother, your mother-in-law, the family doctor who saw three generations—was at least visible. You could argue with your nani. You could tell her that no, you don’t actually need to eat ghee at every meal, and here’s the study that says why. The new authority is diffuse and arrives on your phone at 2 am when you can’t sleep. It looks like empowerment because you chose to follow it. But you didn’t really choose, because the algorithm chose for you, based on what you were already anxious about, which was itself based on the rabbit hole that the last Reel sent you down.
I don’t think we took pregnancy back from our families; we just handed it to a larger, less accountable group of strangers who are better at producing content.
