By Asha Dahya, GirlTalkHQ founder and Editor-In-Chief
“I think, in many ways, it goes back to a woman’s place in the world.”
That’s the opening line for the trailer of my upcoming short documentary ‘A Tiny Revolution’, which tells the story of the woman who invented the first home pregnancy test. Her name is Meg Crane, 85, and lives in New York City. She invented the test in 1967 when she was working at a pharmaceutical company called Organon as a graphic designer, but it would take another 10 years (1977) until it finally came on the market in the United States.
As someone who has struggled a lot with my identity, role and place in the world since becoming a mother in 2017 at the start of the first Trump administration, Meg’s statement has been playing on a loop in my head over the past few months. And as the nation prepares to celebrate Mother’s Day, it felt very fitting to talk about womanhood, motherhood, resistance and progress, inspired by her story.
I interviewed her right at the start of Women’s History Month, and have been planning the release of the trailer to coincide with Mother’s Day this year. It felt fittingly ironic, in a way, because although the test itself feels so commonplace today, back in the 60’s and 70’s, the thought of giving women the power to discover and plan their own pregnancies was highly controversial, in the same way we are used to seeing with many other reproductive issues today such as IVF, abortion or even the decision not to have kids.
Before her invention, women found out they were pregnant by going to their doctor with their husband – most doctors would not see a single pregnant woman according to Meg. The doctor was most likely white and male. The woman would take a pregnancy test which would then be sent to a laboratory, and wait 2-3 weeks for the results to come back. The doctor would then call the husband to let him know the result of his wife’s test.
Meg’s push to bypass this patriarchal gatekeeping and put something as life-changing as a pregnancy test directly in the hands of women, which would allow them to find out results within 2 hours instead of 2-3 weeks, was indeed revolutionary, but initially came up against a lot of barriers.
Some of the laboratory people refused to work on her invention because they deemed it “evil”. There were religious people who heard about this invention and (predictably) described it as “immoral”. Her boss at the pharmaceutical company didn’t think women were competent enough to follow instructions to do this themselves, and they also didn’t want to take away business from doctors.
Perhaps the most eye-opening reason for initially not wanting to make the home pregnancy test was when her boss said he was worried that, for example, a Senator’s wife or daughter might discover she is pregnant, throw herself off a bridge and then the company would be sued. Because this was still the late 1960’s and Roe v Wade did not yet exist, part of the pushback to the test was that they were concerned women would choose abortion.
The message back then was clear – as a woman, you do not own your own decision-making capabilities, you should aspire to motherhood, and your place in the world is strictly determined by the patriarchal systems and infrastructures around you.
Nevertheless, Meg persisted in pushing back against these barriers in her quiet yet confident way, and by 1977, after seeing the test successfully hit shelves in Canada, parts of Europe and North Africa, the pregnancy test was finally available for women to purchase in the United States. A tiny revolution indeed, at a pivotal cultural moment which included the passing of Roe v Wade, second wave feminism and the sexual revolution.
But as we know now, when it comes to progress for women in the United States, it is never linear, and what we are seeing today in 2025 proves this.
In April, the White House announced a new initiative to encourage more women to have babies, to counteract the declining birth rates. But instead of choosing to tackle the glaring issues that American mothers are struggling with – lack of affordable childcare, no federal paid leave policy, and a healthcare system that is still inaccessible to approximately 12% of new mothers, the majority of whom are Hispanic and low income – the Trump administration offered performative solutions such as a national “medal of motherhood” for women with 6 or more children, menstrual cycle education, and a $5000 “baby bonus” check. None of these have officially been implemented, and neither has Trump’s supposed IVF accessibility Executive Order signed in February.
The message we seem to constantly see reinforced is that the ultimate role or place for a woman is to become a mother (and a wife), and if you don’t aspire to that, you are not conforming to the dictated gender norms. The version of motherhood being presented is certainly not an autonomous choice supported by social safety nets and programs.
Where we see this most explicitly is in the abortion bans and restrictions that are present in 19 states. (It’s worth mentioning here that the majority of people who get abortions in the United States – 60% – are already mothers). Since the 2022 Dobbs U.S. Supreme Court decision which overturned Roe v Wade, we are seeing an increase in the number of mothers being criminalized for pregnancy outcomes, and others are dying because they happen to live in states like Texas or Georgia that cannot provide life-saving abortion care in emergency situations.
This notion of motherhood being the ultimate destination for a woman doesn’t even live up to its own expectations in the United States. We have a rising maternal mortality rate, the highest in the developed world, which disproportionately impacts Black mothers. The worst type of gender wage gap we see is what has been referred to as the “motherhood penalty”. Since COVID-19, mothers have been continually leaving the workforce year after year which experts say will eventually impact overall GDP growth and family economic mobility.
In 2024 the then-U.S. Surgeon General issued a report stating that parenting in the U.S. is now considered a serious public health hazard. Mothers are experiencing the highest rates of anxiety and depression in the country, where postpartum depression and postpartum anxiety specifically affects between 10-20% of women after childbirth. And perhaps the most depressing motherhood data point of all can be found in a new study which outlined that deaths by homicide and suicide are the leading causes of maternal death in the United States. Reproductive “rights” almost rings hollow in a nation that is steadily regressing.
Being a woman and mother in the United States today carries an undeniably heavy, socio-political burden. When I think about both my son and daughter’s futures, I constantly ask myself: What kind of world am I going to fight to build for them? What am I going to teach them about a “woman’s place”? And what tools will they use to shape the answer to this question for themselves?
Which brings me back to Meg Crane and her journey to invent the home pregnancy test. She knew this device was something women needed, and that they deserved to do on their own. In a country where so much of our bodily autonomy and choice to self-determine our futures are controlled by a number of external factors, Meg’s invention shifted an incredible amount of power from a patriarchal system into the hands of women, in just one small piece of the larger puzzle toward motherhood.
Related to all of this is the recognition that it is more important than ever to share the stories of women who have changed history, at a time when the federal government has been working overtime to erase the contributions and achievements of women in a number of industries.
The historical timeline of how the home pregnancy test first came about perhaps seems insignificant and uncontroversial today, given how common a stick pregnancy test is and its availability over the counter at pharmacies and even at dollar stores. But documenting Meg’s story and knowing what it took to create this test makes me look at progress a little differently.
Perhaps we will never see massive changes in one big swoop when it comes to tackling the most pressing issues mothers face today. If there is anything I can take comfort in, it is that the everyday small actions can push the needle of progress in the most surprising ways. The decision to become a mother, while fraught with so many complexities and barriers today, can be the foundation to inspire us to fight for change.
Perhaps a woman’s place is in the revolution, and not just any revolution, but in the millions of tiny, everyday revolutions each of us can create.
Stay tuned for the complete short documentary to be released in late 2025!
