Are you smart enough to perform a home pregnancy test?

In the old days (my youth) a pregnancy test consisted of providing a urine sample to the doctor who would send it to a lab for analysis. The lab would send the results to the doctor who would then inform the patient. In 1967, Margaret Crane, a 26-year-old product designer who worked for one of the labs (a pharmaceutical company), noticed the urine analysis kits and wondered, “why not just cut out the doctor entirely?”

That night she designed a user-friendly home-testing version of the analysis kit and brought it into the company, begging her managers to consider the idea. They all said no. For one thing, they imagined a scenario in which “a senator’s daughter, unmarried, found she was pregnant and jumped off a bridge.” Such an outcome would be the end of their company, they reasoned.

It wasn’t only suicides they feared. The opposition to home testing was multifaceted. To begin with, there’s resistance to giving patients control over their bodies, not to mention giving them the right to obtain private information about their bodies. What’s more, those in charge feared antagonizing doctors and aligning themselves with “fast women” who desired a fast test. They were also worried that frightened 13-year olds would be the main users of the test and questioned whether their patients could handle bad news. They also questioned whether patients were smart enough to perform a home test, saying, for example, they “have a hard time following even relatively simple instructions.”

It took ten years to break these barriers. Even though 1967 was the dawn of the sexual revolution, abortions were generally illegal and 26 states barred single women from obtaining birth control. The home test kit was not available in the United States until 1977—four years after Roe v. Wade and ten years after Ms. Crane proposed it. Too late for me.

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