Today in my Early Medieval Europe history class, I had one of the funnest discussions ever that bridged from talking about Medieval ideas about sex (“only okay if done to make a baby”) to a 20th-century pregnancy test my students thought sounded perfectly Medieval.
And this would be “the rabbit test,” and it involved killing a rabbit to see if you were pregnant, and so I had to agree with my students. But indeed, the rabbit test, which seems kind of witchy and barbaric, was the definitive way that women could tell if they were pregnant in their first trimester from the 1930s to the 1970s. (My students’ eyes bulged in disbelief when they found out. Très amusant).
The test was developed in 1927 when Selmar Aschheim and Bernard Zondek injected the urine of pregnant women into juvenile female mice or rabbits. When pregnant, humans secrete a hormone called hCG, or human chorionic gonadotropin. If you put it in young rabbits (selected because they were easier than mice to work with), they go into sexual maturity and their ovaries change. But you can only tell if you kill the rabbit. The phrase “the rabbit died” became a code for “you’re preggers.” But it is a misnomer, because all the rabbits died, whether the person was pregnant or not.
Eventually another test developed that was much more humane — this one with frogs who didn’t have to die. The African clawed frog of the “Hogben test” would lay eggs within 24 hours after being injected with the urine of a pregnant woman.
These tests were expensive and so were really for wealthy people. By 1978 home pregnancy tests had become available, and the rabbit test became a completed, and relatively short, chapter in human medical history.
Sources: _Today I Found Out_, “The surprisingly recent time tests using rabbits and frogs were the good standard to accurately detect human pregnancy,” June 13, 2016, Karl Smallwood. _The Washington Post_, “An early U.S. pregnancy test involved sacrificing rabbits,” Gillian Brockell, Oct 17, 2021
