Earlier this month, a Texas judge ruled that mifepristone, a drug in the two-drug pill that makes abortion more accessible, should be banned, the latest in a series of moves to further restrict access to abortion. From Roe vs. Wade was annulled last June, many have compared the present moment to the previous era Roe, when thousands of women died trying to obtain an abortion in unsanitary and dangerous circumstances. As someone who has studied abortion during the time it was banned, I find these comparisons valuable. However, they also have limits. A big difference: in the previous time RoeWe didn’t have home pregnancy tests. This technology provides women who wish to abort more information about their pregnancies. It can also put them in danger.
The first US patent for a home test was issued to a graphic designer named Mega Crane in 1969although it would take until 1978 for the test to be widely commercialized in the US When Crane first presented his design to executives at a pharmaceutical company, he was explicitly told they were not interested in creating a home pregnancy test; he worried that women would secretly take these tests when they didn’t want to get pregnant, which would increase the number of abortions. They went ahead with the product only when it seemed Canada would be a more willing market after the country’s abortion laws were passed. liberalized in 1969.
In the mid-1980s, products like EPT, Clearblue, and Answer advertised pregnancy tests that could accurately diagnose pregnancy as early as the day of your missed period, at which point you would be considered about four weeks pregnant. The wand-shaped pregnancy test we know today was introduced to the UK in 1987 and then onto the US market about a year later. This test eventually popularized home pregnancy tests, because it meant that women no longer needed to urinate into cups and mix their urine with various chemicals to get results.
By contrast, before pregnancy tests became widely available, most women didn’t know they were pregnant until they were at least eight weeks old. A doctor’s visit was the most common way to find out you were pregnant, and women were advised to wait until they missed one, if not two, periods to make an appointment. (Even after doctors administered a test, it typically took two weeks to get results.) The home pregnancy test allowed women to access these results more quickly and on their own terms and gave them the privacy to decide how to proceed with their pregnancies. .
But many of the postsRoe the restrictions that are now being implemented are also based on this access to information. When states like Georgia, Iowa, Kentuckyand Florida attempt to ban all abortions after six weeks, lawmakers assume that people have access to home pregnancy tests that could return results before that threshold. The federal appeals court judge who just the restricted use of abortion pills after seven weeks of pregnancy was making a similar assumption. In fact, the whole concept of knowing you’re pregnant at six or seven weeks is based on the existence of the home pregnancy test.
Today, if you visit any pharmacy, you will see numerous brands of pregnancy tests on the shelves, all stick-shaped and promising results sooner than ever. The more expensive brands advertise that they can diagnose a pregnancy six days before your missed period, which could mean a pregnancy diagnosis at three weeks and one day. (Though if you read the fine print, you’ll learn that tests are significantly less reliable when taken so soon.) Some home pregnancy tests even promise information about how many weeks you have been pregnantin addition to a negative or positive result.