Pregnancy Test
As a teen in the early 70s my sexually active friends began to rely on pregnancy tests to keep their parents out of the loop. When one female friend reported to her boyfriend, “I’m pregnant,” she had to travel to Puerto Rico for an abortion; for the procedure was outlawed in New York State.
In her 169-page non-fiction book, Pregnancy Test (Object Lessons), Karen Weingarten explores the history and politics of the pregnancy test and its effect on our culture, as well as my young pregnant friend and others like her. The pregnancy test used today was initially designed by Margaret Crane in the late 1960s when she was working for Organon, a health care company.
Crane brought her idea to her boss who rejected it. Why would Organon invent a device to compete with their lucrative laboratory pregnancy test? Also, the executive didn’t believe women were intelligent enough to accurately administer the test themselves. But times were changing.
Soon after this exchange, Organon looked into viable pregnancy test designs hiring an outside expert to pick the company’s best sample. All were rejected but Crane’s. Why? Her design provided a component the other (male) designers overlooked: a cup to collect the urine.
The pregnancy test has been around for most of my life, so we tend to take it for granted. Weingarten’s book, The Pregnancy Test is extremely well researched, entertaining to read, and shows how the pregnancy test has affected the lives of people of my generation and all that have followed while telling the history of the test and what it means to be pregnant. This is one book everyone should read, especially men, to develop a deeper understanding of the compelling needs of the females in our lives.
About the Author
I’ve known Karen all her life. When she was a child, she was a voracious reader with a keen intellect far beyond her years. Unsurprisingly, today Karen Weingarten is an Associate Professor of English at Queens College, CUNY. Her first book was Abortion in the American Imagination: Before Life and Choice, 1880-1940.
