Feminist appropriation of pregnancy testing in 1970s Britain

31 replies

EmbarrassingAdmissions · 14/04/2021 13:23

This is an interesting paper that told me a lot about the origins of OTC and greater availability of pregnancy testing: The feminist appropriation of pregnancy testing in 1970s Britain

Women have long relied on bodily signs such as a missed menstrual period or morning sickness to self-diagnose pregnancy.14 By the early twentieth century, some working-class women continued to offer their urine for visual inspection to the ‘water doctor’, but the medical encounter was increasingly mediated by the laboratory, including for pregnancy testing.15 Between the late 1920s and the mid 1960s, laboratory workers injected women’s urine into living animals—first mice and rabbits, then frogs and toads—to ‘diagnose’ pregnancy. If present in sufficiently high concentration in the patient’s urine sample, the ‘pregnancy hormone’ today known as hCG (human chorionic gonadotrophin, the same molecule later detected by home tests) triggered physiological changes in the animals, which reliably constituted a ‘positive’ result. Crucially, pregnancy testing was, in this period, a diagnostic service for medical professionals only; the only way a woman could obtain the result of a laboratory test was from her doctor. A few specialised centres and most hospitals, but not doctors’ surgeries, were equipped for pregnancy testing. G.P.s would post a patient’s urine sample to a lab and it could take a week or more for the result to come back.16

From the late 1940s, pregnancy testing was made freely available on the N.H.S., but only for medical reasons; doctors rejected demand from so-called curiosity cases: healthy married women likely to have an uneventful pregnancy.

www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09612025.2017.1346869

I thought this was a fascinating insight into a topic that I didn't realise I knew so little about and a reflection on woman-centred healthcare.

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Original poster

EmbarrassingAdmissions · 14/04/2021 21:50

I had no idea that pregnancy testing was such a controversial issue in the past

No - nor that GPs considered it a 'luxury' and superfluous item. I'm trying to think when the knowledge about prenatal vitamins and folic acid came in - and when was it that women would have consulted their GPs/whomever for prenatal care. Or when SMP came in.

It's provoking so many social history questions for me alongside the medical ones.

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LilithTheKitty · 14/04/2021 17:17

Thank you for sharing the paper. That was really interesting- I had no idea that pregnancy testing was such a controversial issue in the past and that wo many women worked so hard to make it available.

Original poster

EmbarrassingAdmissions · 14/04/2021 15:01

I want to assure people that the full paper is available to read for free because the whole area is fascinating.

The meticulously kept records of a rural G.P. interviewed by feminist sociologist Ann Oakley in the early 1980s show that he ordered pregnancy tests for only 1.3% of his female patients in the late 1940s and 38.8% in the late 1970s, a thirty-fold increase in three decades.20 Many G.P.s, however, disapproved of ‘social’ pregnancy testing as an abuse of the already overstretched service. From the mid 1960s, by which time mass-produced immunological test kits had supplanted living animals, commercial labs served women directly, not as ‘patients’, but as ‘clients’. So too did pharmacists as well as branches of the F.P.A., Brook, B.P.A.S. and P.A.S. The thriving non-medical market for pregnancy testing paved the way for Britain’s first do-it-yourself test kit, Predictor, in 1971.21 By then, some two-thirds of all women had heard of the once taboo subject of pregnancy testing.22

The idea of PT being a 'social' rather than necessary use of healthcare resources is by contemporary standards but - even then - I'd have thought it necessary to know if you were pregnant for a mass of reasons.

And the paper details that it was women's groups in some areas that ran weekly testing drop-in sessions - I had no idea that women's groups had funded and staffed these.

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MeltsAway · 14/04/2021 14:56

doctors rejected demand from so-called curiosity cases: healthy married women likely to have an uneventful pregnancy

soooo paternalistic!

CardinalLolzy · 14/04/2021 14:33

Wow, interesting! Have saved to read later.

YetAnotherSpartacus · 14/04/2021 14:25

There is a depiction of this in an episode of MASH where Margaret thinks she is pregnant.

Sadly, the female rabbits used for the test had to be euthanised (killed) in order for their ovaries to be examined (Spoiler: Radar's isn't).

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