Nowadays, if a women thinks she may have a bun in the oven, it only takes ten bucks and a couple of minutes
to get an answer from the privacy of her own bathroom.
But it wasn't always so.
Back in the day, people used everything from barley to bunnies to predict pregnancy—
often with surprising accuracy, and sometimes with devastating ecological consequences,
and of course, lots of urine.
Lots of urine.
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The ancient Egyptians, for example, had a fun way of determining pregnancy.
The lady in question peed on a pile of wheat and barley seeds.
And if, over the course of several days, the wheat sprouted, she could expect a girl — and if it was barley,
a boy.
Interestingly enough, researchers tested this method in the 1960s and found that it was 70% accurate.
At least at the sprout - no sprout, baby - no baby part.
The baby's gender part, that was total bunk.
It may be like all the extra estrogen in the urine that helped the grain to sprout.
In medieval times, physicians got really into eyeballing pee.
They could allegedly determine pregnancy either by examining color or clarity of the urine, and
sometimes mixing it with wine to see what happened.
We're not sure about the accuracy of these methods, but since alcohol does react with certain proteins in urine,
these guys may have been on to something.
In the 1900s, researchers started honing in on the concept of hormones
They began to notice a pattern of fluctuations throughout a woman's 28 day menstrual cycle
and saw a sharp spike in the level of HCG (human chorionic gonadotropin)
in pregnant women, and nowhere else.
So basically, they discovered that a certain amount of this hormone indicated pregnancy
and that it was key to accurate testing.
Today's tests still work by measuring HCG.
But, throughout the 20th century,
other methods were explored; the AZ Pregnancy Reaction Test popped up in 1928 and was the
first of several "bioassays" or animal-based tests.
Named for German researchers Selmar Aschheim and Bernhard Zondek,
the patient's urine was injected into a baby
female mouse or rat. If the animal suddenly went into heat despite being
sexually immature it was assumed that the woman was pregnant and her hormones
were kicking off an early estrous cycle for the rodent.
Then came the rabbit test and with it a new euphemism featured in such timeless
cultural beacons as mash and Aerosmith songs
"The Rabbit Died". This popular phrase morbidly indicated that a lady was in
the family way and referred to the Freedmen test, which involved injecting,
yes, pee into a female rabbit.
But the term "the rabbit died" is misleading because
every rabbit in fact died.
Not because mom pee killed them, but because the doctors did. Lab animals
back then were considered even more expendable, and the quickest way to see
results was to euthanize
and dissect bunnies to look at their ovaries. The HCG in the pregnancy urine
triggers what's known as Corpora Hemorrhagica, a temporary growth on the
rabbits ovaries easily spotted by product doctors within 48 hours of pee
injection. Then came the Hogben, or "Frog Test", named for the British biologist
Lancelot, yes,
Lancelot Hogben. This test traded bunnies for African clawed frogs.
The test carried on a familiar theme; inject some urine and see if the female frogs
starts to ovulate. During the baby boom of the nineteen forties and fifties,
demand for pregnancy detecting frogs was high, and tons of African frogs were
exported all over the world. Because female frogs naturally lay eggs that are
visible to the human eye, the Frog Test had the advantage of not killing the animals.
So considerate.
So when the test became obsolete, some clinics released these
little Freddy Krueger's into the unsuspecting wild with totally
disastrous results because man, have those frogs gotten their revenge.
See, these invasive clawed frogs carry and transmit a nasty fungus known as BD that
causes the deadly and untreatable disease chytridiomycosis.
Now, it's not dangerous to us, but this thing is wreaking havoc on native amphibian
populations and has been the cause of massive decline, endangerment, and
extinction of over 200 species worldwide. Luckily, pregnancy tests kept getting
better, cleaner, faster, and cheaper over the decades. For a while, blood tests were
the best way to do it, but even that took several days and necessitated a visit to
a clinic. The first home pregnancy tests hit the American market in the late nineteen
seventies and, while they were revolutionary, they resembled chemistry
sets full of bottles, mirrors, tubes, and vials of sheep's blood and weren't the
most user-friendly things. But things finally got easy and efficient in the
late nineteen eighties when the first modern pee on a stick tests hit the
shelves and drug stores everywhere. They use tiny strips of fabric infused with
antibodies that detect the HCG hormone and basically have taken the guesswork
out of everything.
It's easy to forget all of these modern conveniences and the weird things that we
had to do to get to where we are now.
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