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.
Goodness - wouldnt you think they would just have to wait and see, rather than sacrfice a rabbit? Thankfully we're blessed with great technology nowadays.
i dont know, i always had the worst luck, i bought the test hat you had to pee in the tiny cup, then stick the stick in... i always seemed to lose abit of my pee - i wouldn't call that civilised! One day we'll just have to breathe onto a machine and it will pop up immediately with POS or NEG (or something along those lines - we've come from killing rabbits to peeing on sticks, it can only get MORE civilised from here!!)
there is a MASH show where Margaret Houlahan thinks she might be pg and they have to run the test on one of Radar's rabbits. They do a hysterectomy on the rabbit though rather than killing it.
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The Rabbit Died!
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