There was a poignant item about pregnancy tests on Radio 4’s In Touch this week. (Tues April 12)
About how there is no way that a blind woman can check the results of a home pregnancy test for herself, in private, & so be the first to know, be it welcome or unwelcome news.
To be honest I was not very sympathetic to the trail – I belong to a generation which had no option but to go to the doctor, other of course than to wait until Mother Nature made it absolutely plain. And the standard advice was to wait until you had missed two periods, to save wasting the doctor’s time on false alarms – in itself an agonising wait, especially if you were not on a clockwork 28-day cycle.
It was possible to get early confirmation from a lab test (memory tells me this involved toads), but a test would only be offered to those who had a really important need to know, or could afford to pay.
We are now into the second generation of women who take home pregnancy tests for granted, & one of the stories we heard was from a woman who can still, a quarter of a century later, hear the sharp intake of breath by the person who read to her the unwelcome news of a pregnancy which would mean, among other things, that she would be sent down from college.
From more enlightened times we heard of a young woman’s disappointment that she could not be the one to break the happy news to her husband, because he was the one who checked for the blue line.
We heard from an expert who said that it ought not be too expensive or difficult to incorporate some kind of bleep into the test. However this could not become a requirement to be enforced by anti-discrimination law, which does not apply to medical products as such.
It was news to me that packaging of such is now required to carry Braille labels – I had thought, if I thought about it at all, that the dots on the box of aspirin were there as some sort of stock or quality control code – which in a sense they are, though for the benefit of the consumer rather than the manufacturer or retailer. I did a quick check of other products in the house – antiseptic cream has Braille too, but only on the box, not the tube, & the rules do not appear to apply to vitamin supplements.
Of course we are all getting used to more tactile methods of getting information these days. Even cigarette packets are going tactile now. I have been puzzling over the reasons for this – I doubt if that is somehow to make things easier for the visually impaired. I suspect it may be a crafty step in the battle over logos on tobacco products.
