Sex reckoning: pregnancy testing and intimate life

• In Event: 4163 - Social Dimensions of Reproductive Technologies

Abstract

Tests that occur in biomedical environments, like labs and doctors’ offices, pose specific questions to try to obtain specific information -- a diagnosis, a measurement, a positive or negative. Social scientists in science and technology studies, as well as the sociology of diagnosis, continue to examine tests in the biomedical environment to understand how they are designed, used, and understood by a variety of different actors, over time, and in the doctor-patient relationship. But different interactions happen in the social world when these tests never see the inside of a lab or doctor’s office, and instead they are used in a house, in a Walmart bathroom, or in a dorm room stall. This paper examines one such test, the home pregnancy test, and specifically, its use in contemporary intimate life of people who do not want to be pregnant. Of course, pregnancy tests test for pregnancy. But what else in social life is the pregnancy test putting to the test? To investigate this, I use 85 life history interviews with home pregnancy tests users and partners and a focus group of college-aged men. Each participant was asked to recall, in full, all of their experiences with home pregnancy tests throughout their lives, totalling well over 300 narratives of home pregnancy test usage which I qualitatively analyzed. I find that more than just a test for a pregnancy, the use of the home pregnancy test is a test of roles, relationships, and responsibilities. In the case of people who do not want a pregnancy, it is a moment of truth about their recent intimate life -- a sex reckoning. These findings suggest implications for social life as more biomedical tests move out of the purview of the medical establishment and into the social wild.

Author

• Joan H. Robinson, Columbia University