Risky Hormones. An Internationally Collaborative Research Project in Partnership with Patient Groups

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Risky Hormones. An Internationally Collaborative Research Project in Partnership with Patient Groups

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This project examines, in collaboration with patient groups, the rise and fall of Primodos and other hormone pregnancy tests (HPTs).

Today it may be difficult to believe that doctors ever prescribed pills as pregnancy tests. However, between the 1950s and 1980s, millions of women worldwide were given HPTs: diagnostic drugs that ruled out gestation by inducing menstrual-like bleeding (a ‘negative’ result; no bleeding implied pregnancy). HPTs were first marketed by the West German pharmaceutical company Schering AG (now Bayer) in 1950. Compositionally similar to oral contraceptives, they prefigured ‘the pill’ by about a decade.

Starting in 1967, HPTs came under suspicion; initially for causing spina bifida and then for inducing miscarriage and a range of birth defects akin to those caused by thalidomide, the notorious sedative that was also used to treat morning sickness. In 1978, the British and West German parents of malformed children whose mothers had taken HPTs while pregnant organised to take legal action against Schering. Although HPTs have not been available for decades, new archival findings and scientific evidence have revitalised long dormant patient-led campaigns in Britain and Germany. Against a backdrop of persistent media interest, continuing scientific research, and resumed litigation, our project will cut through the polemic to produce at a subtler, more nuanced historical understanding of HPTs. It will also seek to better understand the West German origins of oral contraception as well as international debates over the use and regulation of drugs in pregnancy and the spectre of birth defects after thalidomide.

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NEWS & EVENTS

The latest News & Events

Event
3 May 2022

What’s at stake in the fake? Indian pharmaceuticals, African markets, and global health

An event of the Topic of the Year 2021|22 “Measuring the Living” and the InterdisciplinaryResearch Group “Future of Medicine: Health for All” of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy ofSciences and Humanities in…
Publications
19 October 2021

The Duogynon controversy and ignorance production in post-thalidomide West Germany

This article examines the West German controversy over Duogynon, a ‘hormone pregnancy test’ and the drug at the centre of the first major, international debate over iatrogenic birth defects in…
Publications
22 October 2018

A historical argument for regulatory failure in the case of Primodos and other hormone pregnancy tests

The drug Primodos and other hormone pregnancy tests (HPTs) remained on the British market for about a decade after they were first implicated, in 1967, as a possible cause of…

UK-German Funding Initiative in the Humanities, 2020-2025