Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. In the 1970s, the invention of the home pregnancy test changed what it means to be pregnant. For the first time, women could use a technology in the privacy of their own homes that gave them a yes or no answer. That answer had the power to change the course of their reproductive lives, and it chipped away at a paternalistic culture that gave gynecologists-the majority of whom were men-control over information about women's bodies. However, while science so often promises clear-cut answers, the reality of pregnancy is often much messier. Pregnancy Test explores how the pregnancy test has not always lived up to the fantasy that more information equals more knowledge. Karen Weingarten examines the history and cultural representation of the pregnancy test to show how this object radically changed sex and pregnancy in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in the The Atlantic. “A new gem from Object Lessons. . . . A quick and quirky read.” ― Zoomer Magazine “Karen Weingarten illuminates the fascinating history, politics, and culture of the pregnancy test in this kaleidoscopic and entertaining volume. It's all in there: life and death, feminist empowerment and patriarchal coercion, scientific discovery and sci-fi dystopia. Weingarten shows how a seemingly modest yet ingenious technology has profoundly shaped-and even brought into being-some of our most intimate, vulnerable, and meaning-filled moments.” ― Lara Freidenfelds, Ph.D., author of The Myth of the Perfect Pregnancy: A History of Miscarriage in America “As anyone who has anxiously shut a bathroom door to take one knows, the home pregnancy test is a riveting plot in and of itself: within its pages, lives are made and unmade. Karen Weingarten's Pregnancy Test tells the fascinating story of how this intimate technology came to be with insight and compassion, suggesting that the strange mix of reproductive agency and reproductive surveillance the home pregnancy test has enabled in US culture will be of central importance as these private dramas become ever more encroached upon by the state.” ― Sarah Blackwood, Associate Professor of English, Pace University, USA Karen Weingarten is Associate Professor of English at Queens College, City University of New York, USA. She is the author of Abortion in the American Imagination: Before Life and Choice, 1880- 1940 (2014). Ian Bogost is an author and an award-winning game designer. He is Barbara and David Thomas Distinguished Professor in Arts & Sciences, Director of Film & Media Studies, and Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis. Bogost is also Founding Partner at Persuasive Games LLC, an independent game studio, and a Contributing Editor at The Atlantic. Bogost is author or co-author of ten books, including Alien Phenomenology (2012)and Play Anything (2016). Christopher Schaberg is Director of the Program in Public Scholarship at Washington University in St. Louis, USA, and the author of The Textual Life of Airports (2012), The End of Airports (2015), Airportness (2017), The Work of Literature in an Age of Post-Truth (2018), Searching for the Anthropocene (2019), Pedagogy of the Depressed (2021), and Adventure: An Argument for Limits (2023), all published by Bloomsbury. He is also the founding co-editor (with Ian Bogost) of Bloomsbury's Object Lessons book series.