Feminist appropriation of pregnancy testing in 1970s Britain

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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.

@PastMyBestBeforeDate

It's not true there was no antenatal care in the 70s. It was different but my dm was certainly regularly being checked in her last pg. At one appointment the doctor decided she needed to be induced early.

It would likely be fairly basic though and more later on than early. Presumably checking urine for glucose, blood pressure for pre-eclampsia and checking the baby’s heartbeat, but by the time those things were done, you’d likely know without a test.

Abortion wasn’t legal either until 1968 so the NHS wouldn’t have considered that a reason to provide early testing up until that point.

This is reminding me so much of Call the Midwife. Women’s healthcare was so different sixty or seventy years ago that I suspect we would be utterly bewildered if we were to go back in time.

I'm finding these nuggets of social history fascinating.

Prior to the first world war, antenatal care did not exist. Women called for a midwife or their GP when they were in labour and most gave birth at home. Midwives attended over 75% of births, usually working alone.

In the 1920s, antenatal care began to develop in response to growing national concern about rising rates of maternal death in childbirth. The goal was to identify problems before women went into labour, although there was often little that could be done to manage issues. Alongside this, the medical speciality of obstetrics developed in the 1930s to offer emergency care, including instrumental and operative deliveries. Specialists believed that GPs did not have the skill to manage complex situations at home and numbers of babies born in hospital began to creep up in the years prior to the second world war.
…
Maternal deaths reduced dramatically from the late 1930s, with the development of antibiotics and later with the availability of blood transfusions and improvements in general health. There is little evidence to say that antenatal care or hospital birth had significant impacts.

theconversation.com/a-history-of-childbirth-in-the-uk-from-home-to-hospital-to-covid-19-149587

The early home pregnancy tests in the mid 80s involved pipettes and test tubes. You added a few drops of urine to the tube that already had something in it, and waited for it to change. It wasn't quick. You could only use urine from first thing in the morning and you couldn't test until you were at least a week late. You viewed your result in a reflection of the tube IIRC. If it was positive you got a dark circle.

The covid tests we are doing for school are very reminiscent of those old pregnancy tests.

As for maternity leave, I was a civil servant so entitled to 18 weeks paid leave in 1985; 11 weeks before the due date to 6 weeks after. I was advised to say I was going back to work, even though I knew I wasn't.

I wasn't aware of folic acid until my 4th pregnancy, and only then because I knew someone on the trial mentioned by a pp, who had lost a baby to spina bifida.

Prion fundal height too. Yes it was basic and in later stages but pp had said no antenatal care.

There is little evidence to say that antenatal care or hospital birth had significant impacts.

It's interesting, even now it's not necessarily clear that some things we take for granted have much impact statistically. Scans, for example, don't seem to improve outcomes.

Infection control seems to have been the major game-changer.

The early home pregnancy tests in the mid 80s involved pipettes and test tubes. You added a few drops of urine to the tube that already had something in it, and waited for it to change. It wasn't quick. You could only use urine from first thing in the morning and you couldn't test until you were at least a week late. You viewed your result in a reflection of the tube IIRC. If it was positive you got a dark circle.

I've just found this article (about.a Netflix series) with a photograph of the sort of kit you describe but possibly an upgrade:

By 1977, the Early Pregnancy Test (EPT) packaged this tedious process into an at-home kit. While this pregnancy test was faster than going to the doctors and waiting two weeks to get lab results, it was still difficult to use: if you accidentally bumped the table the test was sitting on, for example, you wouldn’t get a clear reading. The EPT kit was advertised as being between 91 and 97 percent accurate for positive results and only 80 percent accurate for negative results, which isn’t exactly a reassuring margin of error.
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The most revolutionary change to the at-home pregnancy test happened in 1988, when Clearblue Easy put all the components — antibodies, the color-changing dye, and various other reagents — together on a stick.

www.inverse.com/article/33429-netflix-series-glow-pregnancy-test

I had no idea. I don't know if I just didn't ever go into the correct section of shops to see them but I don't even recall seeing these behemoths in passing.