| Am I pregnant? The answer
to this age-old question once demanded a combination of guesswork,
intuition, and time. In 1978, however, the long wait to know
for sure became a thing of the past. Trumpeted by advertisements
as “a private little revolution,” the first home
pregnancy tests started appearing on drug store shelves that
year. A quarter of a century later, innovations promise to make
even the telltale thin blue line obsolete. This web site looks
at the history of the home pregnancy test—one of the most
ubiquitous home healthcare products in America—and examines
its place in our culture.
The home pregnancy test works by identifying the presence
of the “pregnancy hormone,” human chorionic gonadotropin
(hCG), in urine. Research that led to a sensitive, accurate
test for hCG was done by scientists in the Reproductive Research
Branch of the National Institute of Child Health and Human
Development at NIH.
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