I wish I’d known about this sooner! I just read in the New York Times that last week marked the one-year anniversary of text4baby, “a service that sends free text messages to women who are pregnant or whose babies are less than a year old, providing them with information, and reminders, to improve their health and the health of their babies.”
Cool! I, for one, couldn’t get enough of that stuff over the past two years. During my own pregnancy and my daughter’s first year, I read everything I could get my hands on about nutrition and safety during pregnancy and infant health.
For that very reason, the service may seem redundant. There’s a seeming overabundance of health advice available to pregnant women and new parents in books, brochures, and online. But that assumes that women have the time and resources to seek out health information.
In the scheme of things, mine was a charmed pregnancy. I was lucky to have the time and money to do lots of reading and research. As the NYT reports, lots of American women have no Internet access; millions also lack adequate health insurance and aren’t necessarily well informed about what kind of prenatal or child health care and nutrition programs might be available to them.
What most women DO have these days, however, is a cell phone. Delivering health information via text seems to have hit a sweet spot in target populations. According to the NYT, more than 90 percent of Americans have cell phones.
