# Pregnancy in the early 80s...



## aspiringauthor1623 (Mar 29, 2018)

Hi everyone!
This is my first post here  I am 29 years old, born in 1989 so what I know about the 80s (especially early 80s) is from what my parents have told me and from what I have seen in movies and have read about. The story I want to write takes place in the early 80s. I want to know if anyone can tell me about (teen) pregnancy back then. I know there were early HPT's, but were home pregnancy tests even common back then at all, even if they were available? If so, does anyone know what they were like? Also, what was prenatal care like back in say 1983?? Thanks in advance everyone!


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## DOGGLEBUNNI (Apr 5, 2018)

Here's a pregnancy test timeline from the NIH: https://history.nih.gov/exhibits/thinblueline/timeline.html

I quoted the relevant parts. 



> *1977
> By the end of 1977, e.p.t was ready for the American market. (Because of requirements for the specific wording on packaging and other last-minute details, there is a lag time between FDA approval and wide availability of most medical devices.) In a “Dear Pharmacist” letter from Warner/Chilcott, drug stores were informed that “the e.p.t consumer advertising campaign has been designed to direct the consumer to their drug store to purchase e.p.t”
> 
> 1978
> ...


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## Ralph Rotten (Apr 5, 2018)

We had home kits in the 80s, but the results were always displayed in counterintuitive ways. They would have symbols like + or -, instead of a P for pregnant. 
Kits in the 80s required more attention and processing than modern test kits. Kelly Bundy reads the instructions on an episode of Married with Children.


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## Blackstone (Apr 5, 2018)

aspiringauthor1623 said:


> Hi everyone!
> This is my first post here  I am 29 years old, born in 1989 so what I know about the 80s (especially early 80s) is from what my parents have told me and from what I have seen in movies and have read about. The story I want to write takes place in the early 80s. I want to know if anyone can tell me about (teen) pregnancy back then. I know there were early HPT's, but were home pregnancy tests even common back then at all, even if they were available? If so, does anyone know what they were like? Also, what was prenatal care like back in say 1983?? Thanks in advance everyone!



Sorry if this is Captain Obvious talking but why not ask your parents? Your mom especially, I would think, could give you some valuable insight. Too weird?


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## CyberWar (Apr 28, 2018)

I understand that you are asking about attitudes towards teen pregnancy in the 1980's United States/Western world. Seeing how I was born on the opposite side of the Iron Curtain, I can only objectively tell about what it was like there.

While teenage pregnancies weren't unheard of, they were certainly not widespread enough to be considered a problem, and such incidents were generally considered embarassing enough to hush them up by any practical means. The extent to which such pregnancies existed is difficult to assess, since the Communist authorities were careful to control the spread of any negative information that might cast them in a bad light. Consequently, you didn't hear much in a way of bad news at all, and what you did was largely based on hearsay and not readily verifiable by official means. Social attitudes towards anything to do with sex and sexuality were likewise strongly conservative - it was only in 1981 that the first sex education book was published in the USSR, being viewed as something radical at the time. 

So to put it simply, teenage pregnancy on my side of the Iron Curtain was a taboo in every sense of the word. It was something that wasn't even discussed in polite company, let alone tolerated in society, and given the negative attitudes towards sexuality, young people in general were much less incentivized to explore it and take potential risks with unwanted pregnancies in any case. On the rare occasions that it did happen, it was universally the subject of shock and horror, and unless the teenage mother had a supportive family, her social perspectives were definitely not good. That being said, these girls weren't entirely unprotected, the authorities having the power to coerce the fathers into marrying them or paying child support.


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