Pregnancy After Loss: How to Use (or Not Use) Pregnancy Apps Without Triggering Yourself

If you are reading this, I am sorry. Whatever brought you here, I am sorry.

Pregnancy after loss is its own country. The maps from the first time do not work. The apps from the first time, in particular, do not work. The fruit-size notifications are landmines. The weekly milestone cards are landmines. The "your baby is the size of a [blueberry] this week" alerts that once felt magical are now small, daily acts of cruelty from a piece of software that does not know.

This guide is for the part of pregnancy after loss that nobody wants to write a help article about. The technical part. How to actually use, or stop using, the apps without making the days harder.

We will be practical. We will not pretend we have answers for the grief part. We will not be saccharine. If you came here for "thoughts and prayers" content, I respect you enough to send you somewhere else.

The quote that started this article

"This last pregnancy was the FIRST time I told myself: Okay. Calm down. Enjoy it. You deserve to be excited too. I downloaded The Bump app. I was reading my fruit size updates every week & telling my hubby the milestones. MY BABY IS A BLUEBERRY TODAY. ... Then boom. Lost my baby. And the sick part? I still have the app notifications on my phone. I can barely open them but I also can't turn them off." — r/babyloss

I have read this quote maybe fifty times. Every time, I get to the part about not being able to turn the notifications off and feel a specific kind of helpless. Not because it is hard to turn off pregnancy app notifications technically, but because the act of turning them off requires you to open the app, to look at the milestone card for the week you are no longer in, to confront the version of your future that the app is still tracking.

The apps did not cause the loss. But they were not built for after. And nobody told you that when you downloaded them.

If you are still in the grief, before another pregnancy

The first question, and the one almost nobody answers directly: should you delete the pregnancy apps from the previous pregnancy?

You do not have to. There is no right answer. Some people delete them immediately. Some people leave them for months and then delete in a rush one Tuesday. Some people open them once a week to read what the app thinks their baby would have been doing this week, and that is a way of being with the loss, and it is also okay.

If you want to delete them but you are scared the app will lose your data, here is what to do, app by app.

How to actually exit each app

The Bump: Settings → Profile → My Pregnancy → Edit. You can change the due date, end the pregnancy, or delete your account entirely. To stop notifications without deleting, Settings → Notifications → toggle off Weekly Updates. The notifications stop within a day or two.

What to Expect: Profile → Account Settings → My Pregnancy → "I had a loss." This will stop the weekly milestone push notifications. If you want to delete your account entirely, the option is in Account Settings → Manage Account → Delete Account.

Ovia: Profile → My Profile → "I am no longer pregnant." Ovia has a more sensitive flow than most. It will offer to stop notifications, mute the social feed, and give you the option to switch to their early-pregnancy-loss tracking mode or simply pause. To delete account: Profile → Settings → Account → Delete Account.

Glow Nurture / Glow: Account → Pregnancy → Update Pregnancy Status → "Lost my pregnancy." This will stop the weekly milestone content and switch you to the cycle tracker if you want it.

BabyCenter: Account → My Pregnancy → Update Status. Choose "I had a loss." Push notifications stop. Newsletter emails are a separate setting under Email Preferences.

Pregnancy+: Settings → My Pregnancy → End Pregnancy. This is one of the cleaner flows in the category.

Cudly: Settings → Quiet Mode. We have a dedicated mode for this. It pauses all weekly milestones, photo prompts, and heartbeat reminders without deleting your previous journal. You can come back to it whenever you are ready, or never.

If you are pregnant again, after a loss

This is the harder section. You do not want to delete the apps, because you want to participate in this pregnancy. You do not want the apps to participate the way they did last time, because last time they became part of the wreckage.

A few specific settings, by app, that help.

How to make existing pregnancy apps more loss-aware

Notifications: Turn off all weekly milestone push notifications across every pregnancy app you have installed. Not the in-app cards (you can still see those if you choose to), but the push notifications. The push notifications are what ambush you on a Tuesday morning when you are not ready.

Email digests: Same. Unsubscribe from every weekly email digest. The unsubscribe link is at the bottom of every email by law. Use it.

Fruit size language: Most apps still default to "your baby is the size of a [fruit] this week." Ovia and Glow let you toggle this off in some versions. If your app does not, consider not opening the weekly cards at all and just using the app for symptom or appointment tracking.

Forum / community feeds: Disable. Universally. The forums in pregnancy apps are very rough for pregnancy-after-loss users. Other pregnant women, mostly first-time, asking innocent questions, will trigger you in ways you cannot predict. The disable option is in Settings → Community → off.

Birth Month groups: Leave them. Even the gentlest Birth Month group will have a member posting about a complication, a scare, or a loss, and you do not need that exposure. You can find a dedicated pregnancy-after-loss group if you want community (r/PregnancyAfterLoss is moderated thoughtfully; the Postpartum Support International forums have a PAL channel; some local hospitals run PAL groups).

Symptom checker / risk score features: Many apps now have AI-driven "personalized risk" widgets. They are not well-suited to PAL users. The brain that lost a baby does not need an algorithm hinting at risk. Disable.

On Cudly specifically

We built Cudly's Quiet Mode after reading the r/babyloss quote above. It is not a marketing feature. It is, genuinely, the feature we are most proud of.

In Quiet Mode:

• No weekly fruit-size cards
• No weekly milestone push notifications
• No "baby is the size of a [thing]" language anywhere in the app
• No photo prompt push notifications
• No heartbeat reminders
• The journal is still there, fully functional, if and when you want to write
• The week tracker is hidden by default, available behind one tap if you want it

You can turn Quiet Mode on at any point, including the day you download the app. You can turn it off and on across the pregnancy. We will never push you back to "normal" mode.

We chose this approach because pregnancy-after-loss users are often the ones for whom features designed for joyful first-time moms become daily injuries. The same milestone notification that delights one user is what is keeping someone else from opening the app at all.

Here is how Cudly works, and here is what we will never do with your data.

On home dopplers and pregnancy after loss

This deserves a careful paragraph. Multiple women in r/pregnancyaftersb have described buying home dopplers for the second pregnancy and having complicated outcomes.

Some, like the woman in this quote, found a heartbeat at home, which delayed a call to the hospital that should have happened sooner:

"I had a bad experience with a doppler. With my first son, a stillbirth, I used it when I was worried, and I heard his heartbeat and it reassured me. I would have gone to the second hospital sooner if I hadn't done that." — r/pregnancyaftersb

Others found that the home doppler helped them through the worst anxiety windows:

"I have an at home doppler that I use almost every 2-3 days (I'm 18 weeks). I have an anterior placenta so sometimes it takes a minute to find. It does bring me some peace of mind for now, as well as my husband." — r/pregnancyaftersb

Both of these are true and both of these are the experience of women who lived through a loss. We are not in any position to tell anyone in your situation what to do.

What we can tell you is that the doppler is not a check-up. If anything feels off, please call your provider, no matter what the doppler says. PAL users get fast-tracked at most clinics. Use that. Call. They expect to hear from you.

For the longer version of the doppler argument, see Is It Safe to Use a Fetal Doppler at Home Every Day?.

A short list of things that have helped real PAL users

These are aggregated from PAL forums, books, and conversations with users:

• A specific therapist who specializes in pregnancy loss and PAL. Not a general therapist. The specialty matters.
• A standing weekly OB or midwife appointment in the first half of pregnancy, scheduled in advance, so you do not have to ask for reassurance.
• One trusted person (partner, friend, sibling) to text on the hard days, instead of posting publicly.
• A physical journal or a private app (Cudly, Day One, Apple Notes). Not a social platform.
• Permission to skip the milestone weeks you are dreading. You do not have to mark week 16 if week 16 was when you lost the last one.
• Naming the previous baby in the new pregnancy journal if that helps. Or not, if it does not.

What I wish the app makers understood

If anyone from a major pregnancy app is reading this, I wish you understood that the default settings of your app are causing real, sustained, daily harm to a meaningful percentage of your users. Not because you intended any of this. Because nobody who reads loss research designed the notification copy.

The fix is not technically hard. It is a sensitivity mode, on by default for any user who indicates a previous loss. Push notifications off. Milestone cards muted. Community feed hidden. Fruit-size language replaced.

I hope someone builds it inside Ovia, BabyCenter, The Bump. Until they do, Cudly has it.

A note to you

The grief is not on a timeline. Whatever you are doing right now is fine. Deleting the apps is fine. Keeping them is fine. Opening them once a month is fine. Never opening them again is fine. Coming back to this article a year from now is fine.

If you want a quieter place to put this pregnancy, we built one. If not, we still see you. Take care of yourself today. That is the whole job.

"Happiness feels scary. ... We were so happy and then we lost her, so being happy feels like a threat, honestly." — r/babyloss

We know. We are not asking you to be happy. We are just trying to make the apps a little less loud while you do whatever you can do.