1980s Home Pregnancy Test

On the way to today's super-simple, one-piece pregnancy tests, women needed use these first home pregnancy test kits with test tubes, then wait hours for a result. Clear Blue Pregnancy Test, 1988 From the late 1980s, easy to use at home pregnancy tests became an increasingly common way for mums. 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. But things weren't always so simple. In the 1960s, the only way to test for pregnancy was to make a doctor's appointment, give a urine sample, and wait up to two weeks for the results.

Home pregnancy tests became widely available in 1978, although they took two hours to develop and were accurate for negative results only 80 percent of the time. Nowadays, they can supposedly tell. By the early 1980s, home pregnancy tests were based on an enzyme immunoassay or immunochromatography to detect hCG in urine.

4 By 1988, monoclonal antibodies were introduced into home pregnancy testing. "We made a statement in 1980 that the most accurate kind of (at-home) pregnancy test is the monoclonal antibody test. But the less.

What did the first pregnancy test look like? The first home pregnancy test, which appeared in drugstores in 1977, looked like a kid's chemistry set: it contained a vial of purified water, an angled mirror, a test tube and red blood cells taken from a sheep. "Clearblue One Step" home pregnancy test kit with urine sampler giving result in three minutes, made by Unipath Ltd, England 1988 Pregnancy was confirmed in only three minutes by the 'Clearblue, One Step' pregnancy test kit. The kit contains two tests.

It measures levels of human chorionic gonadotrophin (HCG) in the urine. HCG is a hormone produced by the body during pregnancy. The urine.

From the beginning, advertisements for home pregnancy tests focused less on how they worked and more on what they offered-privacy, autonomy, knowledge of one's own body.