[C4EMD] Chapter Two
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The bulk of this book is devoted to cataloging and considering the myriad risks to personal privacy posed by digital devices and social media during pregnancy, from the instant of conception through the first hazy, blurry days of parenthood. Without question, those are the most pervasive cybertraps that expecting moms and dads will face. But logically enough, there’s no point in discussing those privacy risks and other cybertraps if there’s no pregnancy in the first place. Over the next several chapters, we will examine the ways in which our use of cell phones and smartphones may be interfering with our ability to reproduce.
The most serious impediment to human reproduction, of course, is death; as general rule, once you die, your days of splashing around in the human gene pool are over. [2.1] Back in April 1973, when Motorola employee Martin Cooper made the first cellular phone call from midtown Manhattan to Bell Labs in New Jersey, it is doubtful that he or anyone else really imagined that mobile phones would ever pose any kind of threat to human life. But over the course of the last half century or so, cell phones have become a contributing factor in a startlingly large number of deaths each year.