In Whose Hands

The home pregnancy test is a technology that can be purchased in drug stores, gas stations, and online, and the results are often casually posted to social media. But, as sociologist and attorney Joan Robinson argues, no technology is as simple as it appears. In Whose Hands traces this test from its origin story in a lab to its day-to-day existence in the hands of users, showing that mundane technologies matter, especially when they are used as tools of surveillance and self-surveillance. The book is the result of Robinson's fourteen-year exploration of the social life of the home pregnancy test, and it describes the breadth and beauty of people's messy reproductive lives today. Based on archival and legal research as well as interviews with home pregnancy test users, it shows how even those technologies that we use because they're convenient can be tools of shame, surveillance, and control. In this book, award-winning medical sociologist Joan Robinson examines the passage of this device from the hands of medical professionals to the hands of lay people and asks, has the pregnancy test delivered on its initial promise to give women knowledge, information, and control? Since the Women's Health Movement, it has become second-nature to think of reproductive health tools in the hands of doctors as oppressive and in the hands of women as liberating, but how does an examination of the home pregnancy test challenge these assumptions? Robinson argues that putting the informational power of pregnancy into a mobile diagnostic technology and making it available over the counter may have made many women's lives easier, but it did not change the nature of women's subordination. Instead, in many cases, it cemented it. TheHome Pregnancy Test provides a new way of understanding the consequences, both intended and unintended, of technologies being introduced to users. Technologies are not neutral objects, either in their origins in a lab or in their deployment in our world. The pregnancy test was shaped by the social context in which it was conceived, and its delivery has had far-reaching consequences on women's lives.

Joan H. Robinson is an assistant professor of social science and law at City College, CUNY, in the Division of Interdisciplinary Studies. She received her PhD in 2018 from the Department of Sociology at Columbia University, where her dissertation, In Whose Hands: The Pregnancy Test in American Life, received the Robert Merton Award for Best Dissertation.