Hopefully most of you have forgotten the 1978 film Rabbit Test, directed by Joan Rivers, starring Billy Crystal as the world’s first pregnant man. If you haven’t heard of it, know this, it should have died like the rabbits in the early pregnancy tests.

The original pregnancy test really was a “rabbit test” and the rabbit always died. In the 1920s, scientists discovered a hormone known as human chorionic gonadotropin (hCG) that was produced early in pregnancy. It was also discovered that when injected into certain animals the hCG would cause changes in animal ovaries. The first test, discovered by Selmar Aschheim and Bernhard Zondek, was performed on mice. In 1931, Maurice H. Friedman test was born. Human urine was injected into a rabbit and forty-eight hours later, the rabbit was killed and its ovaries were examined to determine if the person was pregnant or not.

Modern pregnancy tests are still based on measuring the amount of hCG present in urine or blood, without the use of a rabbit. The first home pregnancy tests were approved in 1976. Raucous celebrations were held in many rabbit families.