After deciding to tell my Mum that we're TTC (we weren't going to say anything), after she finished squealing with delight, she told me about The Rabbit Test. I thought she was joking, then I googled it and found this...


"The rabbit died," she whispers into the phone.

Her husband didn't have to be told, he knew what that meant, there was a bun in the oven!

The phrase, "The rabbit died," came to be a euphemism for a positive pregnancy test in the late 1920 and early 1930s. Around 1927 it was discovered that if you injected the urine of a pregnant woman into a rabbit, there would be corpora hemorrhagica in the ovaries of the rabbit. These bulging masses on the ovaries could not be seen with out killing the rabbit to inspect the ovaries, so invariably, every rabbit died, even if the woman wasn't pregnant.

Today, no bunnies are sacrificed for a woman to find out if she's pregnant. Tests today still look for Human Chorionic Gonadtropin (hCG), we have invented tests that are much easier to perform using blood or urine.

Blood tests are done to determine the presence and quantity of hCG in the blood of a woman.


Celsie. xoxox