Thanks to NetGalley and Bloomsbury Academic for the opportunity to read this book in exchange for an honest review.

Weingarten's work should be required reading for everyone, from high schoolers studying history to elected officials responsible for making healthcare policy that affects anyone who might need to use a pregnancy test.

I genuinely was learning something new constantly throughout this entire read. Weingarten is meticulous in her research and grounds herself squarely in science, but she writes in a way that is extremely accessible to even those who don't have a background in science or medicine. Her ability to first state facts as they are and then comprehensively address the impact of the facts on various groups of people from a various number of perspectives is incredible. She truly writes with fairness and balance.

This book discusses both the history behind the diagnosis of pregnancy over time and across the world, and also the social impact of becoming pregnant in different situations, and the impact of having (or not) access to determine pregnancy status, and whether that assessment is private or public. There are so many layers to consider from so many different angles, and in such a short time, Weingarten covers that immense ground.

I cannot recommend this book enough.

Karen Weingarten's Pregnancy Test explores the history and culture of the pregnancy test for American Women in the 20th Century. It is a history full of animal death, blood, gender expectations and improved accuracy and shifts in control from the personal to the medical and back.

Weingarten spends the first half of the book detailing the history of the pregnancy test, beginning with the work of Margaret Crane, the woman who designed and created the prototype for the first home pregnancy test. From this initial section, the gendered assumptions and expectations are clear. Out of all the test prototypes, Crane's was the only one created by a woman and also the only one to consider how urine would be collected.

Chapter two discusses the discovery of what we now refer to as the hormone hCG (human chorionic gonadotropin) that is the key component in diagnosing pregnancy. (pg 4). Doctors then learned that they could inject samples from women into first mice, then rabbits, and after an autopsy could determine whether or not the woman was pregnant. With this increase in medicalization of pregnancy tests women were discouraged from trusting their own bodies. The rest of the history section discusses the development and improved accuracy of the test and the lowering price of access that had its own cultural and racial implications.

Part 2, looks at different facets of American culture and how they have been shaped by the pregnancy test. Weingarten samples print advertisements, televised commercials, pregnancy tests as plot points in comedies, soap operas or other visual media to the present on TikTok and other social media. This section concludes with discussions of the "science fiction of pregnancy testing." (chapter 8, starts page 113). Here the realities in Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale is contrasted with it's television adaptation. Some of the other works discussed are Alaya Dawn Johnson ("They Shall Salt the Earth with Seeds of Glass," Leni Zumas's Red Clocks, and Ling Ma's Severance.

It is with these science fiction titles that we're brought back to the present in considerations of what the test can mean. Of particularly import in the United States is the 2022 overturning of Roe v. Wade making abortion access harder to access in more than half of the US, as Weingarten discusses in the afterword.

This book will appeal to those awaiting pregnancy test results, medical historians, or readers of The Birth of the Pill: How Four Crusaders Reinvented Sex and Launched A Revolution by Jonathan Eig.

A very interesting and informative read. Detailing the history of the pregnancy test, and how it has changed since its first form, it also delved into the societal and cultural impact of this device – with a fascinating exploration in these areas. Always thought-provoking and at times incredibly frustrating – especially when pregnancy tests were used as a weapon against women – I felt that this book had the right balance between scientific facts and the effect it had in society so that it was both informative and relatable with recognisable advertising and features in television shows.

Thank you NetGalley and the publisher for the opportunity to read this book.

Informative and well thought out history of the pregnancy test and its significant cultural and social impact. At times it did get a bit too scientific, but I think it needed to in order to get across how a pregnancy test actually works and really show how women have taken back their body autonomy. The fact that doctors use to withhold pregnancy tests from women, or only discuss the results with their husbands is wild to me.

My favourite section by far were the later chapters on the shift in societal perseptions and how the home pregnancy test has really become a right of passage to pregnancy. The discussion on power and control that pregnancy tests have in some dystopian literature, and by extension into the real world also further highlights that women, especially women of colour still have some way to go in order to reclaim our own rights.

Very interesting read for our womens health/literature dept. something we think of as complacent is actually a life changing tool for woman. I found it profoundly fascinating and thought provoking.

A cultural and historical exploration of the overlooked object at the heart of the sexual revolution.

In the 1970s, the invention of the home pregnancy test changed the meaning of pregnancy. For the first time, women could use a technology in the privacy of their own homes that gave them a yes or no answer. That answer had the power to change the course of their reproductive lives, and it chipped away at a paternalistic culture that gave gynecologists—the majority of whom were men—control over information about women’s bodies.

While science often wants to promise clear-cut answers, the reality of pregnancy is often much messier. As Karen Weingarten shows, the advent of the pregnancy test had far-reaching implications for the nature of pregnancy and our understanding of the timeline of fetal life. In this compelling exploration, Weingarten reveals how a fierce marketing and medical campaign made this object central to our reproductive lives. Essays examine the history and cultural representation of the pregnancy test to show how the object radically changed sex and pregnancy in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

This book is the latest in the Object Lessons series. Published in association with the Atlantic, it explores the hidden lives of ordinary things and what they can teach us about ourselves and the modern world.

Karen Weingarten is associate professor of English at Queens College, City University of New York. She is the author of Abortion in the American Imagination: Before Life and Choice, 1880–1940.