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Home / MCNTalk / Margaret Crane and the Birth of At-Home Pregnancy Testing

August 19, 2016

Margaret Crane and the Birth of At-Home Pregnancy Testing

It was 1967, when abortions were generally illegal and 26 states barred single women from obtaining birth control. Few laws protected “girls” in the workplace from gender discrimination, and employers had the right to lay off women who became pregnant. At-home pregnancy tests were unheard of up until this point, but Margaret Crane, a 26-year-old product designer at Organon Pharmaceuticals saw what at-home tests could mean – “It was a way for a woman to peer into her own body and to make her own decisions about it, without anyone else — husband, boyfriend, boss, doctor — getting in the way.” Ms. Crane built her own prototype and brought it in to her managers for consideration; they all said no.

The top two reasons why an at-home pregnancy test disturbed them so much? The company was worried about their market which was doctors, believing doctors would hate the product; they were also terrified that a woman may harm herself if she were unmarried and found out she was pregnant. Thus the test did not become available in the United States until 1977. This New York Times article that recently appeared in the Opinion Section provides this history, and also presents Ms. Margaret Crane’s story, which offers an insight into social and political forces that can keep medical tools – even trusted and easy ones – out of the hands of patients.

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  1. John Martucci says

    September 8, 2016 at 2:15 pm

    I meant to comment on this when it was first posted. I read the article in the Times when it was released and loved it. It is mind blowing how disproportionate people’s fears are at things. When you look back it seems crazy. For a lot of people in that time it was crazy, but I’m sure the paranoid minds who kept the pregnancy kits off the market for years were not alone.

    The biggest challenge is spotting those same irrational fears today. I don’t want to get political in this forum, but there are examples left and right all around us. I remember when my town hired their first female police officer when I was growing up and you would have thought the world was coming to an end. Now you don’t think twice.

    I’m skeptical of anyone who says the end is coming with any small revolutionary idea.

    Reply

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