To think that the home pregnancy test is the worst thing ever invented?

[wannaBe]

They're clearly designed to make women obsessive about becoming pregnant - and with ever increasing promises of an accurate result three, four, five days before your period is even due their aim is clearly just to cause stress and to make yet more money for the manufacturers.

Ultimately, if you're pregnant you will still be pregnant if you test a couple of weeks later, and if you're having a chemical pregnancy, is there really any need to know? I'm not talking about a full-on miscarriage - of course I'm not, but where the embrio simply doesn't implant but is picked up because of some uber sensitive test, isn't that just adding to the whole stress that is ttc?

When I rule the world I will ban them, and only allow pg tests that are accurate from two weeks after a period is due...

There is no evidence that treatments for recurrent miscarriage work in women who have very early pregnancy miscarriages. By diagnosing miscarriages and wanting "treatment" you may do more harm than good my medicalising a natural process. Most very early miscarriages (under 6 weeks) are because the cells just haven't divided properly. www.rcog.org.uk/womens-health/clinical-guidance/early-miscarriage-information-you
link to RCOG guidelines on miscarriage which states there is no treatment to prevent early miscarriage.

YABU a bit - but what annoys me is how bloody over priced they are! Clearblue were aboyut £7 EACH when I was TTC DS1 - thankfully someone pointed me in the direction of Ebay cheapie strips, which were 10 for £1 and way more accurate.

Actually, 'accurate' is the wrong word. 'Consistent' would be better!

"medicalising a natural process"

Wow. Just, wow, that anyone could be do fucking heartless. Clearly women with fertility problems should just suck up that nature wants them to be barren.

To what other areas of medicine shall we extend the principle of not medicalising a natural process I wonder. Cancer? Heart disease? Diabetes?

ES they are dead cheap on ebay (the type they use in hospitals) and most longish term TTCers buy them not clear blue ££ ones

Rebecca, your post is inaccurate, and not what the rcog info says.

I had to test early due to the need to change / begin treatment following recurrent m/c, and am bloody glad to have had that help.

It's behind me now, but some attitudes to m/c still upset me.

Rebecca, only around 50% of early m/cs are due to chromosomal problems, although that will vary by age. Many women with, for example, blood clotting disorders, or uterine scarring, will have recurring early m/cs, and sometimes the underlying conditions can be treated or treatment to help provided.

What she knows to have once been a foetus would have been, to the best of her knowledge, a late period.

This, and a couple of similar comments on here have really pissed me off. As someone who had a mc at 11 weeks (is that late enough to be considered a real mc I wonder? ), I never realised till then what a dirty secret mc was. No one is supposed to talk about it, God forbid you tell people you're pregnant before the baby actually arrives for fear that a loss might make people feel a bit uncomfortable. Don't talk about it and it's like it didn't happen, never mention the 'M' word and now we have to justify the loss by how many weeks we were otherwise we're getting some sort of kick out of 'mourning' as illustrated by fuckwitted comments such as platform for intense mourning .

When people post crap like that it really makes me question wtf I'm doing on here.

I think pregnancy tests like Cleablue Digital are really misleading and cause more fear than reassurance. I remember using them obsessively with one of my pregnancies that ended in miscarriage, and that week of testing, waiting for the "2-3 weeks" to change to "3+" was agony. I miscarried the following week. Part of me wishes I'd not known, then another part of me was glad I had a heads up for what was coming my way.

With my last pregnancy I tested a week before I was due and got a positive and started on aspirin straightaway as the doctors had suggested. For that reason I think hpt's are really important for women who'll need treatment in early pregnancy.

After an ectopic pregnancy & laser surgery for it, I have to have a scan at 6 weeks for any future pregancies. That's flipping early on, but potentially lifesaving so the quicker I know, the easier it is for the NHS to get me that critical hospital appointment for that 6 week scan. We all know hard it can be to get a GP's appointment in a timely manner & frankly I wouldn't want to waste their time booking emergency appointments for false alarms.

I don't want my son left an orphan cos I was a bit slow off the mark with a future pregnancy. Ectoptic pg still causes death if not caught in time. Molar pregnancy is another potentially life threatening early pregnancy that fills me with horror, and requires all future pgs to be closely monitored.

I'm not gonna stand in judgement of other women who have pregnancies that end unsuccessfully in other ways, like chemical pregnancy. Measuring degrees of emotional distress just isn't productive or even very kind as it's all so personal.

I'm lucky in that both times I "felt" different so knew I was preggers straight away & have a cycle that runs like clockwork. Not every woman is so lucky. I expect women taking certain drugs need to know asap too in order to avoid potential damage to the fetus etc.

Some people are just "precious", be that about their wedding, their pfb, their farrow and ball paint choice or whatever. Pregnancy testing is no different. I've come to accept being "precious" is incurable and steer clear of those types, in forums and RL.

There's no way my early mcs felt like a "late period", much more painful, clotting etc. So I doubt that women in the past thought they were having late periods when they mc.
Obsessive testing can be very hard, so I partly agree with OP, but as someone who needed to take treatment from first BFP it was really important to know early.

I had one very early MC which was different from a period, but suppose it was a good thing I hadn't tested as I didn't have any time to get used to it and attatched

but there isn't really any way of knowing definitively how many a woman has had if they're not testing, I read somewhere that the average woman has had 5 they don't know about. But I did know without testing the time I mentioned, it didn't "come away" in the same way as my periods

I've used dozens of pregnancy tests as personal reassurance that I am not pregnant. I've been on the injection, on the pill, am now on the implant, so all-in-all I haven't had regular periods for nearly a decade and haven't had any periods at all for the last six years. Home pregnancy tests have provided me with much-needed reassurance that I don't need to make some tough decisions.

I have no idea what it feels like to be pregnant, but I know what it's like to have unfamiliar sensations low in the guts; to have aching or stabbing pains; to have sudden light bleeds; to bloat unexpectedly. I also suffer from an anxiety disorder, so it's really rather handy to pay a little bit of money and feel the reassurance that my life has not just irrecovably changed.

I think it is a bit unlikely that in the 'old days' anyone whose period was six weeks late didn't know they were pregnant. I thought that chemical pregnancies were when you tested a few days before your period was due and then your period arrived anyway (late in this context being a day or two, not a week or two). It's the adverts for tests almost at conception that seem wrong to be pushing on the general trying to get pregnant/hoping not to be pregnant population (although I can see that there are some specific reasons why they might be helpful).

I can see your point, but you don't HAVE to use them.

We've been ttc for 4 months and I've never POAS. I have a free pg test called "has AF turned up?"

Good luck with it all

what are the recommended ebay cheap tests? anyone pm me a link or link on here? :)

We have been TTC for 2 years now and have had around 8 chemical pregnancies in that time.

For me it was good to know I was pregnant early so I could let my doctor know what was happening but I cant seem to get past 4.5/5 weeks this time.Had tests and there is nothing wrong,its just seems to be one of those things.Doesnt make it any less painful though.

YABU op - would you rather everyone was wasting GP time rather than spending £4 on a two-test pack?

that and the hassle of getting an appointment, yada yada - particularly difficult for women who have reason not to want to be pregnant...

*Hmm I think I prefer the home pg tests. Either I am, or am not pregnant. Answer given. Move forward with the result.

I must have missed something, surely, because this all seems obvious to me.*

You are missing something, chemical pregnancy. Ie fertilisation has taken place but the embreo has not implanted so there is no pregnancy.

Another reason, anyone wanting a child, should bare in mind is that this squews the data for fertility treatment. Instead of turning up to a clinic having not concieved people are turning up saying they havve had multiple miscarriages. So it adds to the waiting list for those who have had miscarriages and the couple who actually have not concieved are treated as though there is a history of miscariage

inout, this is an old thread so expect people to reply to the op and not to you. You can just put 'early pregnancy tests' into ebay and you'll get lots of choice. I used these ones for example. They're all much of a muchness. As long as the seller has good feedback and lots of it, a pregnancy test should be a v cheap thing.

For me, i have had 7 mcs.

Attending early mc clinics and advised that as soon as i get a + home test to begin injections of progesterone, high does FA & asprin in order to try to save one of my babies.......

When desperation rules your world, and the tiniest fleck of hope rests with those two lines and early intervention...then bloody hell, dont begrudge me that.

8 weeks pregnant is not a chemical pregnancy! You would have missed 2 periods by then so unless your cycle was hugely irregular you wouldn't think it was just a late period. I miscarried at 8 weeks 2 months ago, and bled massively for days and delivered a placenta with attached tiny foetus in the shower. Not the same as a late period at all.

i was a POAS addict luckly on ebay i paid £2.50 for around 30.

Had I not known I was pregnant I would have probably assumed my ectopic was a slightly late period and very, very bad wind/period pains. I wouldn't have gone to A&E as fast, been referred to the early pregnancy unit and had a traumatic but medically swift and easy laparoscopy. I don't know what would have happened but I think it would have been even worse than the reality, which was shitty enough.

Elemental, and others, so sorry for your losses