Who Was Afraid of Pregnancy Tests? Gestational Information and Reproduction Policies in France (1920-50).

Though resulting from a long-term process, the need to manage pregnancies both medically and bureaucratically became a state concern, especially from the 1920s onwards. A woman's official obligation to notify the state of her pregnancy (and therefore to know it on time) goes beyond a matter of biopolicies and poses a range of contradictions. 'Pregnant or not?' - as an issue of knowledge - is a powerful tool for apprehending the tensions between individual freedom, privacy, institutional requirements and professional powers.In order to better understand the historical meaning of pregnancy diagnostics in mid-twentieth-century France, this paper combines three dimensions: uncertainty and its management; the informational asymmetry between institutional agents and women; and the diachronic dimension of gestation. Writing this history sheds more light on an apparent paradox: while knowing and notifying one's own pregnancy became a duty, the tools that could help women eliminate some doubt right from the first months of their pregnancy - in particular the innovation of laboratory diagnosis - was seen as a danger. When, in 1938, private laboratories began publishing advertisements for the laboratory test in the most widely-read newspapers, tending to reframe it as a commercial service, the anti-abortion crusade was increasing its propaganda and its political pressure. This crusade's legal victory proved incomplete, but for a long time some of the most conservative physicians recommended great parsimony in prescribing testing. Combined with reducing the legal time limit for notification, this conflict shows how the state injunctions towards women could look like a 'double bind'.

Thin blue lines: product placement and the drama of pregnancy testing in British cinema and television.

This article uses the case of pregnancy testing in Britain to investigate the process whereby new and often controversial reproductive technologies are made visible and normalized in mainstream entertainment media. It shows how in the 1980s and 1990s the then nascent product placement industry was instrumental in embedding pregnancy testing in British cinema and television's dramatic productions. In this period, the pregnancy-test close-up became a conventional trope and the thin blue lines associated with Unilever's Clearblue rose to prominence in mainstream consumer culture. This article investigates the aestheticization of pregnancy testing and shows how increasingly visible public concerns about 'schoolgirl mums', abortion and the biological clock, dramatized on the big and small screen, propelled the commercial rise of Clearblue. It argues that the Clearblue close-up ambiguously concealed as much as it revealed; abstraction, ambiguity and flexibility were its keys to success.

Bringing the pregnancy test home from the hospital.

This paper explores the settlement process of one of the most common home diagnostic tools currently in use, the home pregnancy test. The controversial new device appeared to threaten the jurisdiction of both doctors and Food and Drug Administration regulations, while it aligned with the women's health movement's goals. But this study finds a more nuanced narrative: one of boundaries and positions that at once were blurry, later shifted, and were ultimately aligned without compromising the credibility of doctors or the legal system. To understand this process, the roles of court decisions and regulations are explained by stages of juris-technical accordance. In this case, rather than restricting technological innovation, legal innovation provided pathways for widespread acceptance of the home pregnancy test by various groups. As more tools move from expert users to layperson users, this paper demonstrates the utility of examining existing juris-technical assemblages as we consider the future of self-monitoring and self-diagnosis.

The demand for pregnancy testing: the Aschheim-Zondek reaction, diagnostic versatility, and laboratory services in 1930s Britain.

The Aschheim-Zondek reaction is generally regarded as the first reliable hormone test for pregnancy and as a major product of the 'heroic age' of reproductive endocrinology. Invented in Berlin in the late 1920s, by the mid 1930s a diagnostic laboratory in Edinburgh was performing thousands of tests every year for doctors around Britain. In her classic history of antenatal care, sociologist Ann Oakley claimed that the Aschheim-Zondek test launched a 'modern era' of obstetric knowledge, which asserted its superiority over that of pregnant women. This article reconsiders Oakley's claim by examining how pregnancy testing worked in practice. It explains the British adoption of the test in terms less of the medicalisation of pregnancy than of clinicians' increasing general reliance on laboratory services for differential diagnosis. Crucially, the Aschheim-Zondek reaction was a test not directly for the fetus, but for placental tissue. It was used, less as a yes-or-no test for ordinary pregnancy, than as a versatile diagnostic tool for the early detection of malignant tumours and hormonal deficiencies believed to cause miscarriage. This test was as much a product of oncology and the little-explored world of laboratory services as of reproductive medicine.

Medicalizing reproduction: the pill and home pregnancy tests.

This article explores one chapter in the history of medicalization through a focused study of oral contraceptives and home pregnancy tests. Each commercially successful in developed nations and both decades old (the Food and Drug Administration approved oral contraceptives in 1960 and home pregnancy tests in 1977), these reproductive technologies created the first pharmaceutical mega-market comprised of young, healthy, sexually active, heterosexual women. Examining the discrete, but interconnected, histories of both products, this article explores how the Pill's popularity and profitability medicalized and feminized contraception, encouraging pharmaceutical companies to invest in the development of patented variants of hormonal contraception and creating a means by which the under-used Pap smear could be introduced to a population that had previously resisted it. Home pregnancy tests, too, had unintended consequences. Designed to shield the detection of a pregnancy from a "medical gaze," the test's widespread use encouraged women to become medical patients at an earlier stage of their pregnancy.

[Laboratory diagnosis of pregnancy begins: Abderhalden's test]. / Poczatki laboratoryjnej diagnostyki ciazy--test Abderhaldena.

The first decades of the twentieth century were the times of intensive search for a reliable laboratory test for early pregnancy. Among some tests proposed, the one developed in 1912 by a Swiss pioneer in clinical biochemistry, Emil Abderhalden, earned greatest response. Unlike other authors of pregnancy tests, Abderhalden claimed that his "defense ferments reaction" (Abwehrfermentsreaktion), if performed according to his methodology, was 100% specific and sensitive for pregnancy, even in its first weeks. Abderhalden's test raised much interest worldwide. Within the first few years from its first announcement, several hundred papers on the evaluation of the test's reliability were published, most of them enthusiastic. Variations of Abderhalden's test were hoped to work effectively as diagnostic tools in psychiatry, oncology, and internal diseases. Many clinicians believed that thanks to Abdehalden's method a wide range of conditions, such as schizophrenia, depression or cancers, could be unequivocally diagnosed with one serum test. In 1928, Abderhalden's reaction as a pregnancy test was replaced with the biological test developed by Aschheim and Zondek. In psychiatry, however, Abderhalden's test was used and evaluated as a diagnostic tool up till the 1930s. Only after Abderhalden's death in 1950 the "defense ferments reaction" was finally rejected as having no reliable scientific background. This paper presents the circumstances in which Emil Abderhalden developed his diagnostic test, the principles of the test, the methodology proposed by Abderhalden, as well as the response to the test and its variations in Germany and other countries.

Historical perspectives in diagnostic clinical pathology: development of the pregnancy test.

This is the first in a series of articles dealing with developments in the history of diagnostic pathology and laboratory medicine for the Journal of Clinical Pathology. The pregnancy test kits of today can give an accurate result within 2 min and are as easily available in the laboratory as they are for over-the-counter purchase. Such kits also find a use in the emergency room when dealing with the diagnosis of sudden abdominal pain in a woman of childbearing age. It is not immediately obvious that the simple urine dipstick tests of today reflect the cumulative knowledge of almost a century of reproductive biology, immunology and clinical chemistry.

[A long-playing record: contraception]. / La Contraception en microsillon.

The humoristic record "Contraception", recorded during the year 1976 by the humorist René Cousinier, conducted the author of this article to study contraceptives means used in France from 1968 to 1976. Here are studied firts pregnancy tests; the birth of Planning familial and Neuwirth law; each classical contraceptives. The Pill is fully related in detail. Each part is illustrated with citations from the record.

"A private little revolution": the home pregnancy test in American culture.

The home pregnancy test went from novelty to norm in twenty-five years. This article explores its cultural impact in the context of the women's health movement. Though women had long made do without it, the "private little revolution," as the test was called in an early advertisement, enabled them to take control of their reproductive health care and moved the moment of discovery from the doctor's office (back) to the home. The article introduces the test, explores its acceptance by physicians and by women, looks at the marketing of the test by drug companies, and traces its use in movies, television, and novels.

Inventions leading to the development of the diagnostic test kit industry--from the modern pregnancy test to the sandwich assays.

The universities are encouraged by the government nowadays to stimulate innovations and also to provide the proper machinery for assisting the protection and commercialisation of innovations. A better understanding of the innovation process may help to create an atmosphere suitable for inventions at the university. Examples can be taken from successful innovations previously made at the university. During the 1960's I made a series of inventions, which ultimately led to the development of the diagnostic test kit industry. The first, which I made as an undergraduate, was a simple and reliable test kit for diagnosis of pregnancy. This was followed by the solid phase radioimmunoassay and a solid phase assay for vitamin B12; next, the dual specific non-competitive sandwich assay and the in-vitro test for diagnosis of allergy, called RAST (Radioallergosorbent test). Organon in Holland with the pregnancy test kit, and Pharmacia in Sweden with test kits for radioimmunoassay, became pioneers among the diagnostic test kit industries. Pharmacia Diagnostics later became one of the leading diagnostic test kit companies in the world and has continued to be so in the field of allergy diagnosis. Each one of these inventions started with a few unique observations leading to a technical development. The pregnancy test as well as the allergy test emerged from the development of assay methods with unique qualities with the subsequent search for appropriate applications. The foreseeing of a commercial value on a future market was a very important step. This was followed by the search for a suitable industry interested to exploit the invention with its new business opportunity i.e. apply for a patent, produce and market the products, which in my case consisted of the necessary reagents and equipments for particular diagnostic tests. Finally, an agreement had to be settled between the entrepreneur and the inventors. This report describes these inventions and particularly discusses some crucial steps of the innovation processes.

Development of the home pregnancy test.

The home pregnancy test works by measuring human chorionic gonadotropin (hCG) hormone in urine. This hormone was initially studied in NICHD intramural laboratories as a reliable marker of certain tumors. Refinement of the assay for hCG detection to enhance specificity enabled its ready application to pregnancy detection.