Karen Weingarten, "Pregnancy Test" (Bloomsbury, 2023)

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If you leave your email address at the end of the survey, there'll be entered to win a $100 gift card to Bookshop.org, a chance to stock up on books while supporting independent bookstores at the same time. The survey takes just five minutes. Your answers are confidential, and your email will never be shared. Head to newbooksnetwork.com to take the survey today. You really appreciate your support. Now go take the survey. Welcome to the new Books Network. Hello everyone and welcome back to new books and sex sexuality and sex work, a podcast on the new books network. I'm Yonna Buyer's your host and I'm here today with Karen Wiengarten. Professor of English at Queens College, which is part of the City University of New York system, to talk to her about her new book pregnancy test out this year, 2023, with Bloomsbury Academic. Hi Karen, how are you today? Thank you so much for inviting me, Yonna. Thanks, it's so great to talk to you. Hi, how's New York? It's good. It's nice weather. Good time to visit in the fall early fall. Lovely. Are you teaching this semester? I am teaching. Yeah. I'm teaching class on medicine and literature. So actually we touch on some of the issues in the book. Cool. That sounds very, that sounds great. So before we get into the book, et cetera, itself, I want to talk about this series that's called the object lessons, which calls itself a book series about the hidden lives of ordinary things. And among the topics covered, I just looked at this long list in so many cool topics, wine, egg, doll, eye chart, hyphen. And I love this idea, right, that objects are not just mere objects. There's piece of material culture that tells us about society. So I wanted to know kind of how this came about. Did you find the series and pitch it or was it just a natural fit? Yeah, that's a good question. So the series has been going on for a while. And I last I heard and I'm sure this is an outdated, dated number. I think they have something like 80 books in the series. And so yeah, they've been working on it for a long time. I pitched the book. You can anyone can pitch a book through their website. And I had written a short essay for a website, a blogging website on the history of medicine and gender called nursing Cleo on the pregnancy test. And I got a lot of attention for this essay. A lot of people reached out to me. And I thought, you know, it wasn't exactly where I thought I saw my research going, but in doing a little bit of research for this short essay, I thought, there's so much about the pregnancy test that could be explored, could be written. And then I wasn't finding a lot out there. And so to me, a series like object lessons seem like a great fit because it's exactly the kind of work that I wanted to be doing. I wanted to look at this object, the pregnancy test and kind of tell explore research and then share that information with readers like what is this object? And it's so present in our lives. We, those of us who both want to reproduce and don't want to reproduce have come to very much rely on this object. And I felt and I just knew that there was going to be a story to tell there. So I reached out to the series. I pitched a proposal and I was accepted, which and I was very happy about because it was an incredibly fun project to write. Right. And here we are. So how did you come interested in the pregnancy test as something to think about intellectually? Yeah. So like I said, I wrote this short essay for nursing Cleo, but my thinking about the pregnancy test goes like started before then. I'm a cultural historian of reproduction. So my first book was about abortion and I've also written a cultural histories of abortion and I've also written about other reproductive technologies. And so my interest started there. And then like a few months before I wrote the piece for nursing Cleo, my sister had what's called a chemical pregnancy and a chemical pregnancy is when you have an egg is fertilized by a spice bar. It implants in your uterus, HCG, which is the hormone that all pregnancy tests tests for is produced by your body. But the fertilized egg is not viable. So your body quickly discards it. And if you happen to take a pregnancy test in the short window between when the egg implanted in your uterus and before, before that your body kind of decided this is not going to be a viable pregnancy, your pregnancy test will test positive. But then usually within or day or so, you'll start getting, you'll start bleeding, you'll get your menstruation will begin. And most people will even realize they had a chemical pregnancy. But my sister who really wanted to get pregnant because she had experienced miscarriage a few months before was taking pregnancy tests regularly and had a chemical pregnancy and was really, really upset. And so I started doing research about what are, you know, why, why did she get this positive result that very quickly turned into a negative result. And I had this, it made me realize that the pregnancy test, which we think of as this object that gives you or yes or no answer, your pregnant or you're not pregnant is actually far more complicated and what it's testing for is far more complicated. And there are ways to be a little pregnant. And actually it led to questions like what is pregnancy, what even is pregnancy. And so that's really where I started doing this research. Yeah, and I want to get back there. Actually, I want to get back to this idea of like what is pregnancy. But I'd like to talk a bit about the history first. I'm going to say myself that's, you know, kind of what I like to go. And I just want to make sure we're all on the same page. So we get the first reliable pregnancy tests in 1927. That's right. Fair. Yeah. So the first, the first, the first successful pregnancy test ever was in 1927. Now that doesn't mean that there weren't like hundreds of years before you could even say like a thousand years before that people would try various things to determine like whether someone was pregnant or not, right. And once you think about it for a moment, you realize, oh, this is actually really useful information to know, right, to know whether the symptoms you're experiencing are pregnancy or there are many other reasons why someone could stop menstruating, could have other pregnancy related symptoms. But the first reliable pregnancy test was developed in 1924 by two German Jewish doctors. And it was nothing like the pregnancy test we know today. It required, I would acquired killing a mouse every time you took a test. And so these two German Jewish doctors scientists, what they discovered is that when they injected mice with a pregnant woman's urine and then waited a few days and killed the mouse and sliced the mouse open the HCG. And again, remember, that's like the hormone that women produce when they're pregnant. The mouse's ovaries would react to the hormone and would swell. And that met that the woman the urine came from or the year was was pregnant. If they injected the mouse with the urine and there was no reaction in that the woman was not pregnant. And so every time someone would want to take a pregnancy test, they would need to kill the mouse. And eventually some of this was improved, but not necessarily in ways that were less animal friendly, like in a doctor, scientist in Pennsylvania decided that rabbits were easier to use. So for many years, rabbits were used for pregnancy tests. And that's why it's on expression that you hear so much anymore. But through the through the 60s and the 70s, every, you know, a euphemism for pregnancy would be the rabbit died. And that meant that someone was pregnant. Of course, the rabbit died, whether someone was pregnant or not pregnant, but it just became a euphemism that derived from the fact that rabbits were often used for pregnancy testing. Yeah, I had heard that before. I'm old enough to remember this, like having heard it like we're adults saying it or something or seeing on a television. And I was, I learned from your book, finally, what on earth that meant. Kind of horrified? I don't know. Yeah, and it's funny, right? Even that, like, what are pregnancy tests? Well, what does that mean, really? But pregnancy tests done in a lab by Dr. Goodwood. Yeah. And one question I had was like, how common was this? Like, how many women actually went to get, to find out that they were pregnant through, you know, through these means. And like you said, this is not something you could do at home. You would have to go to a lab or to a doctor that offered these tests. But it became pretty clear to me when I started doing research in magazines and in newspapers that American doctors, especially advertise this, right? They would tell their patients, like, I could, you know, I could give you a rabbit test to determine whether you're pregnant or not. And I started also seeing ads, particularly in Los Angeles, newspapers, interestingly enough, advertising pregnancy tests that clearly used animals to diagnose pregnancy in women. And I should also add that eventually the rabbit was replaced with a toad. And that was maybe slightly more humane because with the toad, you didn't need to kill the toad because they found this South African species of toad that would ovulate if you injected it with urine with HCG. And it would just ejaculate. Like the eggs would come out of the toad if there was HCG in the urine. And so because of that, you didn't need to, you didn't need to kill the toad, but you did have to keep many, many toads in an aquarium. They were aquatic toads. So there would be these labs full of aquatic toads used for pregnancy testing. It's just such a bizarre. [INTERPOSING VOICES] First to think about today. Yeah, very strange. And it's very strange to think about this period where you might be pregnant. You might not be pregnant. I don't know. And you can't figure that out on your own, which is something I really want to stress, right? Before readily available, affordable, relatively easy to use home pregnancy tests, pregnancy belongs to a doctor. And so what does that mean for a woman who can't even tell what's going on with her own body or can't? But-- Yeah, I mean, I think it's complicated, right? Because I think people, women can often tell when they're pregnant or not, right? They might guess. But I think definitively to know whether your symptoms are actually pregnancy or might be stress-related or menopausal related, right? There's a lot of ambiguity. But to know whether you were definitively pregnant, basically in the US, like through the 19-- for most of-- for most through-- basically the late 1970s, you would have to go to a doctor to take a test. And one of the reasons this ended up interesting me is because I'm very interested in the history of abortion. And the pregnancy test intersects with the history of abortion in really revealing ways, because it meant that it was harder to access abortion. If you couldn't definitively know whether or not you were pregnant, and often definitive signs of pregnancy meant that you had to wait quite a long time before you were absolutely certain you were pregnant. And so then also met accessing an illegal abortion in the United States far later in your pregnancy, which also might result in more complications. It might mean that you were more likely to die, or you might have a harder time finding someone willing to perform an illegal abortion if you were past your first trimester. And at that point, knew that you were definitively pregnant. And so doctors had a lot of control in this era. And I would even-- I found some examples of magazine articles and advice columns written by male doctors where they would actually say that in some cases, they would refuse a woman a pregnancy test if they thought she was going to get an abortion. And so it was really a way of controlling information and by controlling this crucial information, it was also a way to control women's reproductive lives. - And who gets to know, right? So this information can only be released to your doctor. Who might only release it to your husband? - That's right. - Yeah. And there's actually stories of women trying to get the information directly from the lab as opposed to their doctor. Because sometimes it would take labs like a week or two to even report it to the doctor who would then take a week or two to report it to the patient. And labs wouldn't release the information to women directly. Everything had to be mediated through doctors. And yeah, there are also stories about doctors telling husbands that their wives were pregnant before the women themselves actually knew. And so it really brings home how the pregnancy test was used as this tool of control essentially, especially when people couldn't take it at home. - Wow. But then Margaret Crane comes along and changes everything. It's asterisk. - Yeah. - So who is she? Who is this woman? - Yeah. So Meg, Meg Crane, as she likes to be called. She's wonderful. She's in her 80s. She lives actually in New York City. And she-- when she was in her 20s, when she was a designer and she got a job working first pharmaceutical company, Oregonon, which still exists today. And she was working in Oregonon doing a lot of secretarial work, even though that's not what she thought she was hired. And then one day she sees this row of test tubes lined up in the lab at Oregonon. At this point, this is the late 1960s. So at this point, pharmacies are no longer relying on animal testing for pregnancy tests. They've devised a way to test for pregnancy that is basically taking a bunch of like HCG and other kinds of hormones and creating a reaction in the lab that will tell you whether or not you're pregnant. It's not as simple as today's pregnancy test where you have one or two lines, but at least it doesn't require killing an animal or injecting an animal with urine. So she sees these test tubes, these chemical pregnancy tests, and she asks someone, what is this? Because she didn't know what it was testing for. And so a doctor worked in the lab who should become friends with told her their pregnancy test. And he even walked her through like how these tests work. And she noticed that at the bottom of the test tubes, there was a mirror or a very shiny surface underneath. And the reason that shiny surface existed is because the way you could tell whether you were pregnant is if you were pregnant, like a ring, like almost like a small little donut ring emerged that was reflected in the mirror. And that meant you were pregnant. And no donut ring, just kind of like a splotchy pattern meant that you were not pregnant. And so Meg looked at this, she heard the explanation, and she thought, you know what? This doesn't sound that complicated. Like this actually sounds like something women could do at home. And because she was kind of bored with her job and because she was a designer, she kind of just decided to spend some free time coming up with a design that women could use at home. And she just kind of scrapped together her materials. She came up with a prototype and she showed it to her boss. And he was completely dismissive of her and was like, no, absolutely not. We would never want to put this in the hands of women. This, you know, there would be outrage. We would get sued. Women would jump off bridges because they would learn they were pregnant. And, you know, there would be no one to take care of them. And so she kind of dropped it, but she did leave the prototype at work. And then not that long after, like maybe a month, maybe two months later, she hears that there's actually a meeting to discuss a home pregnancy test. And no one told her. And so she basically has a lot of gumption. She sneaks into the meeting with her own prototype and adds it to the lineup of home pregnancy tests that they're looking at. And just kind of takes a seat in the corner and waits for the meeting to begin. And they had hired an advertising exec by the name of ira star avant to come and help them choose which home pregnancy tests they were going to go ahead with. And Ira looks at all the tests and kind of hears like a little bit about how each one of them is designed. And then looks at Meg. And so looks at Meg's tests. is like well this is the only one that really makes sense. This one has a little lid that women can, you know, urinate in. It was just like a much more eloquent design. And Meg's boss, the vice president of work and on, is very dismissive at first. And is like, no, this one is never going to work. It's not cost effective. And so Meg basically does all this research to show how her device is cost effective. And the company goes ahead with her design and ends up being a really wonderful love story too, because Ira and Meg end up becoming life partners and working together and starting, she and eventually leaves, organ on and they start their own advertising, and then a company and they work on a number of projects over the next 40 years, essentially, until Ira passes away. So it's a great story. Yeah. Oh, it's like, I love that story. I love everything about it. And I love that they kind of look happily ever after. But I also love this image of her just sneaking in and sitting there in this room full of men, paying no attention. And like, with their ludicrous designs. Right. I didn't even know to note that like Meg's design, which you could, sorry, you could, you could see an image of Meg's design in my book. And it would become the design for the home pregnancy test for the next basically 10, 15 years until it was improved upon and until we get the stick pregnancy test that that we use today. But the other designs that were originally proposed, all were thought to appeal to like women. And so they had lots of like freely components like pink tassels and little diamonds and Meg was like, women don't care about these things, you know, like just give us something utilitarian. I'm just giving me something I can use that doesn't require. I put a urinate in a drink and glass from my kitchen. That's right. Exactly. So we need so, so funny. And so great. So I mean, this is then the home pregnancy test is an option. But it's by no means done in its with its development. Right. This was like a 10 step progress process or something. Yeah. So they designed it. There's actually there's a patent in Meg's name in the US patent office that you could find if you search online. And then they had to begin kind of getting permission to market and sell it. And it turns out that the FDA was very reluctant to give permission. It wasn't clear whether they needed the FDA's approval. American company pharmaceutical companies seemed a little bit nervous because remember this is this is 1969 when Meg is patting it abortion is not legal in the United States, right. Roe reweight when it passed until for another three years. And so there's a lot of uncertainty about like whether you sell a home pregnancy test and what it would mean for reproductive rights and politics in the US. And so so organ line decides to kind of bypass them American market altogether. And they decide to first sell it in in Canada. And so it's really Canada is is where the first home pregnancy test is marketed to Canadians. And actually the second big market is the Netherlands because organ on was was a Dutch company originally. It might still be I don't know these companies constantly change hands. But yeah. But can't but it's first marketed in Canada primarily in like big cities like in Vancouver Montreal Toronto to Canadian women and it sold in pharmacies. And there are many reasons why they decided to market it in Canada rather than the US. I think one reason is Canada was liberalizing its abortion laws at a faster pace than the US at this time. And also at the time you could a woman could go to her local pharmacist and ask for a laboratory pregnancy test. She and so there was already some degree of anonymity in in Canada. You didn't have to do it through your doctor and you didn't have to get permission so called permission to get a pregnancy test. You could just you could even drive you know to the next town over if you wanted to if you didn't want your local pharmacist to know you were taking a pregnancy test. And that wasn't possible in the US you couldn't you couldn't get a pregnancy test is easily at the time. And so it is so I mean to imagine this world you know that I was not born into. I'm sure you said this might have a different experience. I want to talk about chapter four which is called the stick and I want to know why it gets its own chapter. So the stick is really so so we have the home pregnancy test is invented it's marketed in Canada it's marketed in Europe it takes until 1970 seven well no yes it takes until 1978 for the home pregnancy to come to the US. And really you would think like oh the home pregnancy test is invented like everybody's going to use it everybody's going to be excited about it but actually that doesn't happen at all there's not it's pharmaceutical companies don't find a big market for it and that could be because the test was relatively expensive it cost about the equivalent of forty dollars today. It wasn't super reliable it had to be like you're basically mixing chemicals together right and if you didn't do it exactly the test could be wrong or give you like ambiguous results and there was also a lot of doctors and even women's magazines were discouraging women from taking the home pregnancy test there was their pharmaceutical companies actually took out ads like discouraging women from using the home pregnancy test and to continue to go to their doctor for a laboratory test. And so it's a very kind of sluggish market at first and it really wasn't until the 80s when the technology the science advanced enough that the like that the stick pregnancy and like early variations of it were invented that the home pregnancy really took off where all of a sudden it became the home pregnancy test became a little bit more affordable but also more importantly reliable more reliable and just you know easier to use and one of the things I didn't say is that with these earlier home pregnancy tests you had to wait two hours to find the results and it was it was like it was short into an hour and then 30 minutes but really it took until the 80s and with the invention of the of the stick pregnancy test which is called an Eliza test right which you can see it's a very good thing. And so it's a very good thing to do with the test right which uses actually the same technology as covert test that you know have become so familiar to us during the pandemic were all of a sudden you only had to wait one or two minutes to get your results and that was really transformative as well and it meant that the home pregnancy test became all of us it really just became incredibly popular to the point where today it's hard to imagine anyone finding out their pregnant in any other way. Right then that home pregnancy test and and so I gave that I gave the stick its own chapter because I think it transformed our relationship to home pregnancy testing and home testing in general really right the idea that you can you could test for things at home which was itself a relatively new phenomenon that you wouldn't have to test for things through the mediation of your doctor. Yeah that right and very soon you know we saw this just a couple years ago all the sudden you know if I I'm calling my the health minister to talk about what happened with my home Corona test. Yes. Yeah really interesting. You know so the thing also then with the stick and with this technology then pregnancy isn't a medical isn't a medical thing you're working on with your doctor it's a personal thing you know first at home. And as you noted with this chemical pregnancies or you know just general like there are all kinds of really early miscarriages right so early on we have some who now we have women who know their pregnant. What if it's even possible or if we even should call them pregnancies immediately and so does that is this a redefinition of what pregnancy means. I think so I think it does change how we understand pregnancy right I mean and even like these earlier home pregnancy tests you know that the kind that. And you know if you find that med developed or the laboratory tests using animals you usually had to wait at least two weeks after a miss period to check right and so you're one thing that I think a lot of people don't realize is that when you first when most when you when you first miss your period you are technically already considered for weeks pregnant right because the way we date pregnancy. And so the last menstrual the first day of your last menstrual cycle. And so and then because you usually have to wait until a miss period to check for pregnant. pregnancy, usually by the time you know your pregnant, you're like between three and a half and four and four weeks pregnant. And so early on, it would often take until you might not be six or eight weeks or even ten weeks before you knew you were actually pregnant. And all of a sudden, now you could know whether or not you're pregnant from the moment you missed your period. And even sometimes before you missed your period, right? Some of these, if you look at the way some of these home pregnancy tests advertise themselves, it will say like, you know, you could take this test six days before a misperiod. So we now have the ability to test for pregnancy earlier and earlier when there's so much more that could go wrong, right? Where we don't like so many early, early pregnancies like and in miscarriage. And to the point where some doctors don't even, some researchers say we don't even know how many, right? Because so many times you might not even realize your pregnant, you might get your, you might start menstruating and not even know that you were pregnant because your cycle might just be one or two days off. But if you happen to take that test, you would have known that you had like a very, very early miscarriage. And the reason I'm interested in these questions is one, it redefines what pregnancy is, but it also cuts both ways. And especially in a place like the United States, right? Where Roe v. Wade was overturned. Not this past June, but the June before June 2022. And you now see states creating all these anti-abortion laws that will say things like abortion is, abortion is no longer legal after six weeks of pregnancy, for example. And someone might think, well, six weeks of pregnancy, six weeks is a long time to know whether or not your pregnant. But if we remember that most people don't find out that they're pregnant until four or five weeks. And that's really just if they're testing right away, you know, like right when they have a misperiod, giving someone just like a week or even just a few days to access an abortion in a state where abortion is already very, very hard to access really redefines like what pregnancy actually is. And you know, in an earlier era when these when these pregnancy tests didn't exist, no one would have even thought like, would have thought to define pregnancy like, you know, by like to say like something would be would be outlawed after six weeks, right? Because it would be like outlawing it altogether. And so, you know, I'm interested both in how the pregnancy tests redefine pregnancy laws, but also how these the pregnancy tests sometimes are used coercively to pass laws that really would have been impossible to pass in in an earlier generation before these tests existed. Yeah, I kept thinking about while I was reading, I kept thinking about the whole pregnancy industry, right, the whole thing right from testing obviously, but then Facebook groups and gender reveal parties and mommy influencers and there's all this like this ongoing commodification of women's reproductive systems. And then the way women are disciplined, you know, through their ability to perform the rituals appropriately. And I, you know, I'm not sure I even have a question here, but I'm just wondering if doing this work at you as a person, a fellow person upon whom reproductive expectations have been opposed, it thought about like what this has done to kind of our broader culture surrounding pregnancy. Yeah, I mean, I think it becomes like, it becomes another way to, I mean, to announce pregnancy, and I learned through doing this research that some of these home pregnancy companies actually pay celebrities to take home pregnancy tests and post their results on Instagram or on Facebook or on Twitter and that, you know, the pregnancy tests becomes like another, another, like, you know, status symbol, another worker of announcing pregnancy and you see it, you see it everywhere on social media. And I hadn't really noticed it until I started doing this research, just how pervasive the home pregnancy has has become as a way to announce pregnancy as, you know, and it just feeds into this whole culture of commercializing, commodifying motherhood, commodifying pregnancy and the pregnancy test. I think maybe more than any other object has has become a way to to make that kind of of announcement. You know, I don't want to condemn people or like criticize people for doing it, but it is, it is you do have to ask like why, like what, you know, why, why share your home pregnancy test on on Instagram. Yeah, this like, I understand that it images worth a thousand words, but I'll go with the new one pregnant, like, I know. Yeah, as opposed to the you've urinated on, but yeah, and the, but I certainly do not want to be one more person telling people to reproduce what to do with their bodies. There's enough of that out there. There definitely is, you know, I think for me, it just, it just went to show, like, wow, this test is, it's so pervasive. Like Azizan's, I, in the book, I talk about this scene from Azizan Zare's Master of Non, the TV show, and there's a scene where Denise and Alicia, two two of the main characters who are trying to get pregnant with the help of a friend who's donating his sperm, essentially, and they find out they're pregnant. And the entire scene is wordless, but you see them looking at a stick and they hug each other. And you know that like, they just learn that they are pregnant, right? And to me, it was such a, that scene kind of encapsulated so much about the pregnancy test, like, power and this moment and the way it's become so pervasive, that that every viewer watching that scene knew that what that little stick they were watching, we're looking at is a pregnancy test and what it told them, right? Because it's become this object that we're all familiar with now, whether or not we've taken a pregnancy test ourselves. Yeah, we definitely live in a pregnancy test world. It's very interesting to think about. Really cool book. And a great read to really readable fun, great pros, great stories. I highly recommend this book to everyone. Everyone should read this book. It's a really fun and really cool. So I have just one more question, which is what's next? What are you working on? Yeah, I'm actually working on a, I'm going back to writing about abortion, which is what my first book was about. And I'm working on a collection for Penguin Classics that will bring together various short stories, excerpts from novels, poems, essays from the pre-roverses Wade era that represent abortion to show how the abortion debate changed over the course of the late 19th century and into the 20th century until 1973 when Roe v Wade passed. And so that's my current project. I'm hoping to finish it in the next few months. And then after that, we'll see. Yeah, world heroizer then. All right. Karen Wangartin for Bessar of English at Queens College. Thank you so much for taking time to talk to me today. Look, it was a pleasure. Thank you, Yana. Excellent. All right, take care. You too. Bye-bye.