Dark Magic Rabbit
A magician spins a black top hat to show their audience it’s empty. Then, with the wave of a wand and a few magic words, PRESTO: a snow white rabbit pokes its ears over the brim.
Compared to sawing a person in half, pulling a rabbit out of a hat is a joyful bit of magic that entertainers have been doing for more than 200 years. But after the applause dies down, one is left wondering: where did the rabbit come from? And where did it go?
Today, in honor of the Easter Bunny (who doesn’t actually appear in this episode), we’re pulling a handful of rabbit stories out of our proverbial hat. But be warned: these are dark tales of disappearing pets, occult eugenicists, and animal sacrifice. The secrets behind some magic tricks are more shocking than others.
Featuring Nicole Cardoza, Gwyne Henke, Suzanne Loui, Sally Master, Ana DiMaria, Tanya Singer, and Meg Crane.
Click on images for captions and credits.
SUPPORT
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ADDITIONAL MATERIALS
Join us for NHPR’s 3rd Annual Climate Summit! The theme is “Healthy Connections,” and we’ve got a great lineup of speakers and breakout sessions PLUS a trivia night. And the best part? It’s all FREE. Learn more and register here.
Check out this video of magician and storyteller Nicole Cardoza performing for a group in Chicago in 2024.
Tanya Singer reported on the history of Project Angora for Tablet. You can also learn more about Helena Weinrauch and her blue sweater here.
Read more about the history of pregnancy testing in this paper on Egyptian grain method, rabbit tests, and more, and in A Woman’s Right to Know by Jesse Olszynko-Gryn, available as a free ebook from MIT Press.
The story of Meg Crane’s Predictor test can also be found in the excellent Designing Motherhood, a book and exhibit on human reproduction through the lens of design.
Pagan Kennedy’s New York Times story, which prompted Meg Crane to start sharing her story—and Pagan’s follow-up, which does include Meg.
Click on images for captions and credits.
CREDITS
Host: Nate Hegyi
Reported, produced, and mixed by Nate Hegyi, Kate Dario, Marina Henke, and Justine Paradis
Edited by Taylor Quimby, with help from Rebecca Lavoie.
Our staff also includes Felix Poon
Special thanks to Emily Valencia, Jesse Olszynko-Gryn, and David Bowser.
Executive producer: Taylor Quimby
Rebecca Lavoie is NHPR’s Director of On-Demand Audio
Music by Blue Dot Sessions, Chris Zabriskie, Dozeoff, and Cody High
Outside/In is a production of New Hampshire Public Radio
Audio Transcript: Dark Magic Rabbit
Note: Episodes of Outside/In are made as pieces of audio, and some context and nuance may be lost on the page. Transcripts are generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and may contain errors.
Nate Hegyi: When Nicole Cardoza was a little kid, her mom and dad took her to see something special.
Nicole Cardoza: I remember the first time I saw a magic show… I must have been 4 or 5, I was young.
Nate Hegyi: Like a lot of childhood memories… the details are hazy. It was during the holidays… she thinks maybe at a mall. But There was definitely a Santa… and an old magician.
Nicole Cardoza: He was wearing a suit, it was velvet, and a hat. And the trick that stood out was at the end of the show, when the magician pulled a rabbit out of his top hat.
MUSIC: Leptias, Blue Dot Sessions
The moment this white bunny came out of this black hat, I was like ‘sign me up.’ This seems like the coolest job in the world!
Nate Hegyi: A lot of little kids want to grow up and become something extraordinary. An astronaut. A professional hockey player. And Nicole actually made it happen. Nowadays she is a professional magician, touring around the country, performing sleight of hand.
Nate Hegyi: Do you pull anything out of a hat?
Nicole Cardoza: I don't. I really also don't wear hats like the top hat is not necessarily like my kind of vibe.
Nate Hegyi: But she respects the heck out of that classic trick. I mean, Google “magician” and one of the first images that pops up is a guy in a top hat with a wand and a bunny. Pulling a rabbit out of your hat is an idiom for doing something impossible. It really feels like magic.
Nicole Cardoza: if you, for example, see your card, go into a deck and then disappear and reappear, you could be left wondering like, oh, they probably have two cards, right?
But when you look at a hat and it's empty. And then you see a full, live, breathing, cute bunny sniffing…
…and you can go up and give it a little pet after, maybe give it a pellet. It makes the magic, the illusion, feel just as real as that little bunny.
And when we think about how every trick can be cultivating this discipline of suspending disbelief, it's really resonant when you can, like, feel the result of believing that something could appear from nothing.
MUSIC SWELL AND FADE
Nate Hegyi: But something can’t come from nothing. And the truth behind our favorite magic tricks can be just as surprising… or disturbing… as the illusion.
Today’s classic rabbit trick is a relatively innocent bit of magic. But some say it was inspired by a hoax from the 1700s, a macabre stunt performed by an Englishman woman named Mary Toft.
Nicole Cardoza: she tried to convince people that she was having bunnies, like she was pregnant and she was having bunnies as babies. // she was placing parts of dead rabbits inside herself // to have them come out of her. And, um, there's just some stories that perhaps magicians were inspired by that idea of birthing bunnies.
MUSIC: Waltz and Fury, Blue Dot Sessions
Nate Hegyi: I’m Nate Hegyi, and this is Outside/In. And (in honor of another magic rabbit that’s getting some attention right about now) … we are pulling a few hare-shaped stories out of our proverbial hat. But be warned: these are tales of disappearing pets, occult eugenicists, and animal sacrifice. And the secrets behind some tricks are more shocking than others.
Nicole Cardoza: I want them to leave the shows thinking, what else is possible? What else can change? Where is a rabbit hiding in my life that's just waiting to be revealed.
Nate Hegyi: Stay tuned.
MUSIC SWELL AND FADE
//
Nate Hegyi: This is Outside/In. I’m Nate Hegyi. There is a genre of social video I call the “surprise puppy crying video.” Somebody secretly films their kid or partner… a puppy pops out of a box, or pads down a hallway to greet an unsuspecting victim.
Video clip: [Sound of man laughing]
Nate Hegyi: The payoff, weirdly, is that - when presented with a puppy - a lot of people will start weeping uncontrollably.
Video clip: [Sound of child crying]
Nate Hegyi: But you know what’s even more powerful than making an unknown pet appear out of thin air? Making one you already love vanish, like it never even happened. Here’s Marina Henke.
//
Marina Henke: I grew up in a rodent house. Maybe you know the type. Hamsters, gerbils, guinea pigs. And for one special year… a bunny.
Gwyne Henke: I actually do remember having a moment where I was like, “I'm not a horse girl. I like bunnies, I like rabbits.”
Marina Henke: That’s my twin sister, Gwyne. She was so in love with bunnies she wrote a series of rabbit themed poems in elementary school. I called to see if she remembered them.
Marina Henke: Caroline burrows through, find some lettuce…
Gwyne Henke: Carrots too!
Marina Henke: Snow falls–
Gwyne Henke: Snow falls softly!
Marina Henke: Winter’s sign–
Gwyne Henke: Winter’s sign! Find them quickly Caroline. [Laughs]. I remember liking that a lot. Find them quickly Caroline.
MUSIC: Hanging Rock, Blue Dot Sessions
Marina Henke: Our bunny’s name was Poppy. She was a creamy brown, about the size of a cat. In my hazy memory, she was a good rabbit. A great rabbit even. She had full run of our second floor and spent her days hopping from room to room.
But when I turned nine my parents told us we were moving away. Poppy had to go. So one afternoon we lured her into a cage and dropped her off… at the public library.
This is one of my sharpest childhood memories. I have an image of her hopping across the threshold of the librarian's office. Why? Was she going home with someone? She didn’t stay at the library…. did she?
Either way, it was a disappearing act with no final reveal: we never saw Poppy again.
And, the memory’s always troubled me. Not because I remember feeling all that sad about Poppy, but because I don’t remember feeling much of anything at all.
Now, years later, I figured – the answer to Poppy’s fate must not be that far away.
[Phone ring]
Suzanne Loui: Marina?
Marina Henke: Hellloooo
MUSIC FADE
Suzanne Loui: Hi hon!
Marina Henke: Before I could ask my mom about Poppy’s disappearance… she immediately started disputing the facts. Poppy, she said, was not a great rabbit.
Suzanne Loui: Poppy wasn’t the most social rabbit. He just lived under the beds all the time...
Marina Henke: What do you mean she wasn't the most social rabbit? (Laughs)
Suzanne Loui: I don't think she was! She didn't like to be held that much. Do you remember?
Marina Henke: No it’s so funny. I only have memories of Poppy, of being, like, the best, the best rabbit.
Suzanne Loui: You know Gwyne wasn't exactly like I can't wait home – to get home to see Poppy. I think it was sort of like we gave Poppy away, and she was okay.
Marina Henke: At this point in our call my mom puts me on speaker phone and starts to flip through a stack of childhood mementos. She opens up this old school project of my sisters – “An Autobiography of a Sixth Grader.”
Suzanne Loui: BINGO. Marina. Okay. You know, you have a page of moments of feeling successful or exceptional joy.
Marina Henke: Okay…
Suzanne Loui: Right… Moments of feeling a sense of failure or a loss… “When I had to give away my rabbit.” No!!!! Oh, God. Oh, God. Oh, God.
MUSIC: Tan Mountain, Blue Dot Sessions
Marina Henke: It was proof. Poppy DID mean something to us. Eventually, we got to the reason I’d called. I asked my Mom about my memory, watching Poppy disappear into the librarian’s office.
MUSIC FADE
Marina Henke: Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You're right. There was a family at the library who said they'd take her… Let me let me go online here for just a second. Let me see if she's still working at the city library.
[Phone ring]
Sally Master: Hello.
Marina Henke: Hi, is this Sally?
Sally Master: It is.
Marina Henke: Sally Master has been working at the University City Public Library in St. Louis, Missouri for almost 31 years. You’d think maybe long enough that some family’s bunny story would have faded away a long time ago.
Not so.
Sally Master: So I'll tell you what I remember of that day and what happened to Poppy.
Marina Henke: Sally remembers it like this: my mom had mentioned the bunny to Sally. Sally had mentioned the bunny to her coworkers. And one of those coworkers – a guy named Phil – said, yeah I’m interested.
Sally Master: But for some reason, the day you needed to bring the bunny, he couldn't be here right at that time or something.
Marina Henke: Instead, Sally was the one there for the Poppy handoff. Which, after we left, apparently went a little sideways.
Sally Master: And so I said, oh, I'll just I'll just hold the bunny and carry it to its new spot. And whichever way we were going, suddenly Poppy decided that she didn't want to go there, and she started scrambling in my arms. and off she went.
MUSIC: Shelftop Speech, Blue Dot Sessions
And where Poppy chose to take refuge was in the nest of cables under the IT person's desk. And, um, she was shaken, to say the least, about having the bunny potentially electrocute itself or shut down the server
Marina Henke: Eventually, they did get Poppy out from under the desk. To this day, it’s one of the library staff’s favorite stories.
MUSIC FADE
Sally Master: I remember kind of feeling sad for you because, you know, I had a daughter your age and couldn't imagine her having to say goodbye to a pet. You know, like that. So was it sad?
Marina Henke: This is where I sort of have, like, a black box of a memory here where, like, I don't really remember feeling sad. I think I just it felt like a very novel moment. I remember being like, our rabbit is in our library, like Poppy doesn't, doesn't belong here.
Marina Henke: Sally, you've exceeded my expectations. Thank you so much.
Sally Master: I'm so glad. Um. And tell your family hello from me.
Marina Henke: So Poppy didn’t live out the rest of her life in the library. According to Sally, she went home with an old staff member named Phil. And get this: He had two daughters… I immediately called my sister.
Gwyne Henke: Oh, my God, that's amazing
Marina Henke: To me the craziest detail, though, is that they lived on Dartmouth.
Gwyne Henke: Oh no way.
Marina Henke: Yeah, so they lived a couple blocks away.
Gwyne Henke: That’s crazy!!! Why didn’t we like go visit??
Marina Henke: When my family gave up Poppy to move overseas, it was only for a year. Afterwards, we moved back into the same house, same rooms… just no pet rabbit.
So this idea that Poppy went on to live in an alternate universe with a different pair of sisters just a few streets away?
It was a lot.
I kept imagining Poppy’s second act – I pictured her sweet little bunny nose pressed against her new living room window. Who knows maybe some afternoons she'd seen Gwyne and I walk by. We wondered about her new owners.
Gwyne Henke: I mean, it'd be interesting to know if they thought at all about Poppy's previous life?, I guess that's like if Poppy was happy, I would love to know if she died peacefully. Um, did they let her free hop around their house? Did they love her? Did they write rabbit poetry?
[Phone ring]
Ana DiMaria: Okay hi I’m Ana DiMaria and Clover lived in my room.
Marina Henke: Ana is one of Phil’s daughters. She and her sister Emily were just about the same age as Gwyne and I were. Our childhoods seemed to have ran on parallel tracks. Sometimes in fact, maybe even intercepting…
Ana DiMaria: I don’t know if the kickball situation at the vacant lot was still happening when you were around…
Marina Henke: Oh it was… oh hardcore it was, yeah (laughs)
Marina Henke: And you heard Ana right, after she got new owners, Poppy also got a new name: Clover. The two of them remember learning they were adopting a pet rabbit.
Ana DiMaria: I remember thinking like, okay, well, we're going to get this bunny and it's going to be like this magical, cute little thing, and I'm going to feel like a cartoon character with a pet bunny.
Marina Henke: But it turned out, that dream was a lot better than the reality. Clover was a total pain – nothing like a cartoon character. She mostly hid under the bed. Pooped everywhere.
Ana DiMaria: In my retellings of owning a bunny, I've been like, I would never do it again and she was a demon – that’s kinda been my schtick.
Marina Henke: Between that and a cranky housecat, the arrangement didn’t last long.
Ana DiMaria: But I think we probably only had her for a month, maybe, like total.
Marina Henke: Oh, wow. Okay.
Ana DiMaria: I think so. Maybe two.
Marina Henke: Got it. Oh my gosh.
Marina Henke: I want to be clear, there’s no bad rabbits in this story. And, I realize we probably didn’t have any business getting a bunny in the first place.
Despite the poetry, despite thinking of herself as a “rabbit girl” – turns out my mom was right – Gwyne doesn’t actually remember Poppy that fondly either.
Marina Henke: Like what do you remember about Poppy? Mom said Poppy wasn't very nice, is what she told me.
Gwyne Henke: Uhh I remember that she did not like us to pick her up, she bit a few times – she bit me once. I mean, I remember she chewed all the buttons off of the remote, and she chewed through like every wire on the second floor. I mean, it wasn't really her fault she was a rabbit (laugh).
MUSIC: Overture via Epidemic Sound
Marina Henke: Emily and Ana think they brought Clover back to the library. I could have followed the trail a bit more, but at this point – if I’m being totally honest – I’d lost the thrill of the chase.
All those questions Gwyne and I had: was she happy? How’d she die? I don’t have the answers. It’s disappointing, but to me what’s more disappointing is how my memories of Poppy had been pretty wrong. It’s always a little jarring when the reality of some thing was a little less beloved than you thought.
She wasn’t like the family dog whose death I wept over. Or our orange tabby who's somehow still hanging on. Had it not been for the weirdness of the library drop off… I’m not sure I would have remembered Poppy’s disappearance at all.
What I’d thought was a memory about HER, was really more so a memory about ME. Poppy didn’t go away… we just moved on. And maybe that’s the real disappearing act.
MUSIC
Nate Hegyi: That story was produced by Marina Henke. To see her sister Gwyne’s original bunny poem… along with a picture of Marina and her sister with a different bunny … check out our website, outsideinradio dot org.
//
Nate Hegyi: This is Outside/In, I’m Nate Hegyi. So I’m not someone who thinks too much about where my clothes come from – partially, because most of my wardrobe consists of birthday gifts and super old t-shirts. But our next rabbit story comes to us from producer Kate Dario, who is a long-time knitter. Which is to say, she thinks a LOT about fabrics we wear… the stories they tell about us… and the secrets they keep.
Here she is.
//
Kate Dario: This is writer Tanya Singer.
Tanya Singer: All you see is this, like, massive thing of fur… It's like cotton candy. It's like a cotton candy animal
Kate Dario: Tanya is talking about one of the most impractical looking creatures you’ll ever see: The angora rabbit.
Tanya Singer: …like incredible long fibers coming off of something. You almost can't tell if it's a footstool, a dog, a rabbit. Except that maybe it has two ears peeking out. It doesn't have a bunny silhouette because it's just so, so fluffy.
MUSIC: TwoPound, Blue Dot Sessions
Kate Dario: As animals go, angora rabbits aren’t what you’d call natural survivors.
Tanya Singer: They're not something you'd see in the wild. They really are like the most pure breed of pure breed dogs that you might see that require tremendous grooming and care
Kate Dario: The reason people have bred rabbits into these cotton candy fluff balls… is that angora fur is warm, luxurious, and softer than sheep’s wool. Tanya knows this because she – like me – is a devoted knitter.
Tanya Singer: I've knit with everything, you know, alpaca, yak, cashmere.
Kate Dario: She even has a quirk, whenever she’s in a knit shop looking at yarn.
Tanya Singer: I think I'm just really tactile and…every time I touch something, I put it to my face.
Kate Dario: I totally get this. My mom taught me how to knit… and my closet is full of sweaters she’s made. If my house was burning down… I’d save the orange and gray fair isle knit she made for my dad when they first started dating when they were 19. I get how attached to our knitwear we can be.
For Tanya, knitting isn’t just a hobby. It’s in her DNA.
Tanya Singer: I feel that I was always supposed to be knitting. Textiles have been part of my family like the fabric of my family, if you will, forever. My grandfather was an immigrant to America, and though he was on his papers, a Talmud scholar, he worked here as a tailor and had a dry cleaning store. His wife, my grandmother, crocheted and knit compulsively and everything, including like the toilet paper in the bathroom, was covered and wrapped in some sort of ridiculous knitted thing.
MUSIC: Izeah
Kate Dario: Tanya is Jewish. And she’s written about the connections between Judaism and knitting for magazines like Tablet.
And that’s how she wound up going down the rabbit hole on angora: both the fabric, and the rabbits it comes from.
Tanya Singer: Almost eight years ago. I came across a story about a woman who was a Holocaust survivor, who wore an angora sweater to every Passover Seder, that’s the meal that we have on Passover every year.
Kate Dario: The woman was Helena Weinrauch. And the sweater was a gift… from a woman who had also survived the concentration camps, in her case, by knitting for Nazi officials and their wives.
Along with the sweater came a simple set of instructions:
Tanya Singer: wear it to remember them, referring to their families as both women lost their entire families in the Holocaust.
Kate Dario: Tanya, the writer, was moved. She wrote her own profile of their story for the Jewish Telegraph Agency. At the top of the piece, there’s a Passover photo of Helena… then, 97-years old… beaming in her fluffy, sparkling blue sweater. But from there…Tanya kept going down the rabbit hole. And things got darker.
Tanya Singer: So I sort of ended up like just obsessively researching all facets of this topic and then walked from the angora sweater into this very strange underworld of, of the Nazis and Himmler himself.
MUSIC: Cold and Hard, Blue Dot Sessions
Kate Dario: In the Wisconsin Historical Society Archives, there is a photo book that seems wildly out of place. It was taken by a journalist at the end of World War II, from the Alpine villa of Heinrich Himler. And it documents a breeding program called “Project Angora.”
Tanya Singer: This mass apparatus of industrialized murder had also created this bunny breeding program. And so at the very camps where Jews and many others, millions of others were, were being exterminated, um, there was this incredible handling of these beautiful rabbits who were being bred for their fur and also for wool.
Kate Dario: Project Angora was a Nazi-run rabbit breeding program during World War II. Angora rabbits were housed across 31 concentration camps… including Auschwitz. Himmler, leader of the SS, and architect of the plan to exterminate the Jews of Europe oversaw the project. It began in the early 1940s, as the Nazis pushed into Russia. And their troops needed warmer clothing.
Tanya Singer: The Nazis saw Angora and the Angora breeding as a way to create fur for those bombers, jackets and yarn or wool for socks and, um, long johns or under, you know, undergarments and sweaters, etc., for hats for the troops.
Kate Dario: Up until this point, Angora had been a luxury, primarily associated with Hollywood glamour. And Tanya said this idea fit in with the Nazis twisted ideology.
Tanya Singer: It was high fashion and that that wasn't outside of anything that the Nazis, how the Nazis saw themselves and the Nazis were known for their very fashionable uniforms that on the one hand, um, I think inspired that same sense that like, we are the master race, we are better than, um, and separated them from, from the people around them. And also inspired fear.
Kate Dario: In the photo album, there is a picture of three men standing in front of rows and rows of rabbit hutches. All of them are wearing SS uniforms, with caps and black jackboots. One of them is holding an oversized white bundle - it almost looks like a teddy bear.
It’s hard to reconcile this image with the suffering happening just out of frame.
Tanya Singer: People slept in these sort of shelves. And there was no plumbing, no bathroom. I mean, you can just imagine. Tremendous illness. Lice. Terrible, terrible conditions. No heating, no blankets. I mean, just just the absolute worst.
And just feet from a barrack like that at Auschwitz, there was a heated bunny hutch where angora rabbits were raised in individual heated pens. Each rabbit had its own little cage, and they were brushed meticulously and, um, hand fed produce that was grown in a greenhouse.
Kate Dario: At the height of Project Angora, there were as many as 25,000 rabbits being cared for in concentration camps. Himmler’s ultimate goal with Project Angora was to create a sort of “master race” of German rabbits, a symbol of their agricultural power. And while we can’t say for sure, it’s likely that these breeding programs are partly why German angora rabbits are the biggest of all the breeds today.
MUSIC: Zither Sprak, Blue Dot Sessions
Kate Dario: A lot of the information we know about Project Angora comes from that book taken from Himmler’s villa, now housed in Wisconsin. The journalist who found it settled there after the war. And a few years ago, Tanya got a chance to see it in person.
Tanya Singer: I put on gloves, but I could sit with just me and this book, which was really, um, I can't even describe the feeling that I had.
Kate Dario: It’s white. It’s marked in one corner with the symbol of the SS. And it’s fuzzy: literally wrapped in angora fur that, presumably, came from one of the camps.
Tanya Singer: …the feeling of knowing where this book had lived, where this book was probably made, who who loved this book, and what that person had done… to two thirds of Europe's Jews who were murdered by because of his ideas and his efforts. Um, even now talking about it, there's like a coldness in my veins.
And then also, it's so beautiful. It's like this fluffy book. It's it's yarn. I love yarn, I, you know, I put yarn against my face. It's like it makes me happy. And to think of of yarn and animals, all of it being so twisted and so wrong, um, was, was really was really painful and difficult.
And at one point I noticed that some of the fibers came off the book and were on the black screen of my iPhone, and I just felt sick to my stomach that I might, by accident, take one fiber even of this angora, this SS Angora book with me.
MUSIC SWELL AND FADE
Kate Dario: As hard as that was, to hold this object prized by Adolf Hitler’s right-hand man… Tanya doesn’t shun angora. When we spoke, it was just a few weeks before the start of Passover, the Jewish celebration of freedom, and the exodus of the Israelites from slavery in Egypt. That means, if she’s still able, Holocaust survivor Helena Weinrauch is getting ready to pull her blue angora sweater out of the closet. She’s about to turn 100.
Tanya Singer: She was not a religious person. She's not a religious Jew in any kind of way. And so that she would save this sweater as a special ritual object, like, it's not something most of us have a Passover sweater, but that Helena made this her Passover sweater and forever linked it to that. That taste of freedom, that coming back to life after her captivity, um, is sort of an incredible idea.
MUSIC: TwoPound, Blue Dot Sessions
Kate Dario: Sometimes the fabrics we wear can feel disconnected from the plants and animals they come from. And maybe that’s because, when you DO dig in… that history can be… complicated. But Tanya hopes this story makes us think more deeply about what’s on our tags - whether they say cotton, wool, or angora.
Tanya Singer: We are sensory beings and um, yes, we love our phones and we love screens… But like deep down, like when you get into bed at night, you're not hugging the screen. You know, you you want something soft and cozy and, um, and that's, that's what fabric is and, or can be. And so I think we all, if we really pause and think about it, have a deep connection to the textiles around us.
Nate Hegyi: That story was produced by Kate Dario. We’ve got a link to Tanya’s story for Tablet magazine in our show notes. And you can see pictures of Helena in her blue sweater at outsideinradio org.
//
Nate Hegyi: This is Outside/In, I’m Nate Hegyi. So our last story today has been making me think about a famous quote from sci-fi author Arthur C. Clarke. He said, “Any sufficiently advanced technology… is indistinguishable from magic.”
Anyway. When you hear the secret behind something that seems like magic… Sometimes, you wish you could go back to not knowing. But you can’t. Instead, you just have to tell everybody else.
Here’s Justine Paradis.
//
Justine Paradis: 4000 years before Clearblue, the quintessential contemporary pregnancy test, there was the wheat and barley method.
MUSIC: Offset Edge, Blue Dot Sessions
Ancient Egyptians wondering if they were pregnant would pee on seeds and then monitor them to see how fast they germinated.
Faster germination indicated a possible pregnancy. And the Egyptians were actually on to something. They were aware of the fact that when you’re pregnant, something’s going on in your urine.
But here’s my point. If peeing on barley sounds woo-woo or downright witchy to you, just wait until you hear about pregnancy tests in the early 20th century.
They involved rabbits.
MUSIC OUT
Meg Crane: The rabbits were necessary for lots of their diagnostic tests… the pregnancy tests used both, um, sheep erythrocytes, blood, and also rabbit blood.
Justine Paradis: This is Meg Crane. Today she lives in a small one bedroom apartment in Manhattan, with a couple cats and lots of art – much of it, her own. It’s the kind of building where everyone seems to know her – the doorman, the guy I happened to meet in the elevator, Ralph – who took it upon himself to escort me right to her apartment door.
[knocking]
Ralph: Christine's here to see you, Meg.
Meg Crane: Thank you. Thank you. Ralph.
Justine Paradis: Nice to meet you.
Meg Crane: You too. Come on in.
Justine Paradis: The reason I came to Manhattan to talk to Meg is because of something that happened in her life 60 years ago.
MUSIC: Readers! Do You Read?, Chris Zabriskie
Meg was in her twenties. Just starting out as a graphic designer in New York. And she’d just been hired to help design a cosmetics line for a global pharmaceutical company called Organon. Organon’s campus was in New Jersey. But Meg’s office wasn’t in the main plant. She worked in the living room of a suburban-style house on campus, alongside one of the executive secretaries.
MUSIC OUT
Meg Crane: So, one day I heard this awful, awful screeching noise. Like like torture. Oh, it was horrible. I said, what's going on? She said, well, it's the rabbits, don't you know? And I said, rabbits?! What are you talking about? She said, they're in the basement here, and they're being bled right now. And that’s what you're hearing. And I said no! And oh my God, it was, it was raucous. It was really frightening stuff.
MUSIC: Perhaps It Was Not Properly Manufactured, Chris Zabriskie
Justine Paradis: Let me explain. In the 1920s, scientists identified a hormone called human chorionic gonadotropin, or hCG. It shows up in urine during pregnancy. Not long after that discovery, rabbits enter the story. Lab techs would take the urine of a possibly pregnant person. They’d inject it into a vein in the ear of a young rabbit. If the rabbit ovulated within 48 hours, it meant you were pregnant.
MUSIC FADE
During this process, usually, the rabbits were killed – giving rise to an odd euphemism.
Meg Crane: So in my mother's time, she and her women friends would talk about the rabbit dying, that means you were pregnant.
Justine Paradis: All this was before Meg’s time, by the way. By the 1960s, pregnancy tests no longer required injecting rabbits with urine. But many of them still required, among other things, rabbit blood.
Meg Crane: They would bleed them until they wore out and then they would, they would die. And and one day I'm hearing screaming outside my window… and there were two little children, like maybe five and four, pointing at the house and screaming their heads off, and they're pointing at a clear plastic bag of dead rabbits.
Justine Paradis: That is, um, that is so intense.
Meg Crane: Yeah.
MUSIC: Slender Pick, Blue Dot Sessions
Justine Paradis: I want to pause here to say – this story isn’t actually about rabbits. I’m happy to tell you that, nowadays, pregnancy tests can identify hCG without killing rabbits, or rats, or frogs, or any other animals.
But the reason I travelled to Manhattan to talk to Meg is because she helped change pregnancy tests not for rabbits, but for women.
Back in the ‘60s, you had to go to a doctor or a pharmacy to find out if you were pregnant. If you were unmarried, that experience could be embarrassing, or uncomfortable, or a doctor might not even give you a test.
Meg Crane: Women would go in with a wedding band, a fake one, to see a doctor if they think they're pregnant because they might treat you better.
Justine Paradis: Though, if you were actually married, the experience might not be that much better.
Meg Crane: In fact, I was even told by older people that sometimes if a laboratory did a test and it went back to the doctor… the doctor would tell the husband first. It's hard to believe this, but that was the case.
MUSIC OUT
Youtube: Harlem block party, 1967
Justine Paradis: But change was in the air. Meg was living in Greenwich Village in the late 1960’s. Around her roiled the Civil Rights movement. Assassinations. Rock and roll. Protests against the Vietnam War. And the sexual revolution.
MUSIC: Divider, Chris Zabriskie
Meg Crane: At that point, um, also the other problems too, of course, were abortions because Roe v. Wade hadn't happened. Wouldn't even expect it to happen. Right? That's the other thing. But so many young women, I, myself, and other friends thought, well, what would happen if we became pregnant? Because what would you do? Where would you go? And, and some groups knew where to go and some didn't. And, you know, it was kind of, kind of a messy time.
And I did have two friends that, that actually – one thought she would have an abortion but didn't and decided to keep the child. Another went through one. And it was kind of a scary business because she didn't know how safe it all was and all the rest.
And so if you're anywhere near missing a period or something like that, you think, you know, this might be it.
Um, and when I saw the test tubes on this wall and asked what they were, I thought, wow, that's – you could find this out. You know, you could find this out somehow. And that started it.
Justine Paradis: The moment that started it was on a day when Meg happened to be up at the company’s lab, and she came across a row of test tubes hanging on the wall.
They were pregnancy tests, and they didn’t look that complicated. Instead of having these tests get done in laboratories, Meg wondered why women couldn’t do them at home. Meg wasn’t a chemist, but this wasn’t a chemistry question. It was a cultural question and a question of design.
Meg Crane: I went home that night to New York, and I kept thinking, uh, what would it take to make this happen? … I did have in my drawer, I had a, um, it was by accident, really, a plastic box that had a cap. It was clear… and I took it out and it was absolutely perfect. What luck there was in that. Amazing luck.
MUSIC SWELL AND OUT
Justine Paradis: At the time, Organon’s tests were more complicated than our modern two-minute pee-on-a-stick version. It was a sedimentation test, involving eyedroppers and test tubes and waiting for two hours for the solution to settle.
Meg Crane: It would be like a red or a red brownish kind of ring in the bottom of the, uh, test tube if it was for pregnancy. And if not, it would just be like a murky, milky kind of nothing.
Justine Paradis: So Meg had a big design challenge on her hands. Think about the home Covid Tests we all know and love. You need a place to set the strip, and to follow directions on how many drops to use, how long to swirl the tube, and how to interpret the results.
This test was even fussier. How would people collect their urine? And then, how would people check the fluid without moving the kit and mucking up the results? She made her first prototype from that box from her drawer – a paperclip box.
Meg Crane: And so I took it to the man who hired me, and he looked up and he was so surprised, number one. He kind of laughed and he said, what's this? And I said, well, this is a pregnancy test. A woman you know, can do and herself at home… and he said, well, obviously, you know, we're not going to do that. What would happen to our business? You know, he said, well, we'd lose our doctors… other laboratories wouldn't want to touch us, all the rest. And and he said, kind of go back to doing what you were hired for.
Justine Paradis: But Organon was a global pharmaceutical company. It was actually owned by a Dutch corporation called AKZO. And as it turned out, they were much more open to Meg’s idea – and directed Organon to do a market test.
Meg’s bosses told her of this development, almost as a courtesy – but also told her she wouldn’t be working on it. Get back to the cosmetics, they said. Instead, they hired an outside advertising firm to develop their own design. But when Meg heard they were meeting to look over the prototypes.
MUSIC: System Shell, Blue Dot Sessions
Meg Crane: I crashed that meeting. [laughs] I did. And because it's always snowing there, it's so high up… I slipped and fell on the ice… So the back of my wool dress was a little bit wet on the bottom… And so I stood by the windows, big long row of windows with radiators under them. So I stood there to dry my, my my my dress. And I'm still holding on to my pregnancy test prototype. And so eventually, the room fills up with the executives from the company, and the three guys come in from a product design company, and they put their designs on the table, and I put mine after theirs.
Justine Paradis: Meg’s design was sleek, almost clinical, all transparent, with a eyedropper and a test tube sitting precisely inside that paper clip box. The others – all designed by men, by the way – were quite different. Meg recalls one was squishy, and encrusted with little black diamonds. Another was an elaborate, decorative box – Meg remembers the designer saying he’d intended it to be a keepsake afterwards.
Meg Crane: One had a tassel in the cap. I thought, well, that's not right. You don't. No, no. I'm sorry.
Justine Paradis: You just think about it being involved with peeing in the bathroom – and a tassel? Like, that sounds so messy [laughing].
Meg Crane: [laughing] I know, I don't know where that would come into it.
Justine Paradis: So, all of the prototypes were lined up on the table, waiting to be evaluated.
Meg Crane: And then in walks Ira Sturtevant, who I hadn't met before, who was from the ad agency they hired… Ira walks over to the table and he picks mine up and he said, well, this is the one we're using, right? And they said, oh, no, no, no, that's something Meg did for talking purposes. And he said, well, who's Meg? And they point over to, um, the only woman in the room, actually.
MUSIC OUT
Justine Paradis: In the end, they picked her design. But it took years to bring the home pregnancy test to market. And it sounds like the whole time, people at the company had objections.
Meg Crane: Oh, they're so embarrassed by this. Some of them are… there were people in the laboratory who wouldn't work on it because they thought it was an evil kind of thing. Women should never, ever be doing this. This is what doctors do. And there was a morality question that came up. Somebody actually said that what if a senator's daughter took this and jumped off a bridge? We would lose our business and we'd be sued forever and all that kind of thing… it all went back to their fear of doing something that was not in their plans or something they really didn't know how to handle, let's say.
MUSIC: Lines, Cody High
Justine Paradis: One day, Meg was called into an office, where she found a table spread with papers for her to sign – a patent application, with her name on it. She would be the official inventor of their home pregnancy test.
Organon agreed to a nominal fee for the patent: a grand total of one dollar – which, by the way, Meg never actually saw. The test came out first in Europe, and then in Canada. They called it: Predictor. And this is a curious part of the story: the test didn’t immediately catch on. Change can take a beat.
A lot of the concerns that Meg had heard internally at Organon – they became part of the public conversation. Even the women’s liberation movement didn’t necessarily embrace Predictor. In England, for instance,many feminists had a different vision for pregnancy testing. That pregnancy tests shouldn’t be a product people BUY, and do alone, but that women should go to free clinics, where there was community and resources – like counseling, sex ed, and contraception.
But today, the global market for home pregnancy tests is huge. Worth almost $2 billion dollars. And they’re much simpler than the test that Meg worked with. They rely on totally different biotech – so, no more rabbit blood.
Meg Crane: It's much better. It’s quite, yeah… very magic little machine. It really is. It's quite nice. Yeah.
MUSIC SWELL
Justine Paradis: As for Meg, she’s still working. She moved on from Organon a few years after Predictor, and had a long career in graphic design and illustration. But crashing that prototype meeting was fateful in more ways than one. Remember that advertising director – Ira? The one who picked her prototype off the table on that icy day in 1967?
MUSIC OUT
Meg Crane: When I saw him walk in the door, I don't know what happened. My knees just went – [laughs]. I saw this beautiful man and I thought, oh my god, you know… I went home that night, and I told my roommate… I said, I just met the man I was going to spend the rest of my life with.
Justine Paradis: She was right. Ira and Meg became partners, in both life and business. They never married. And, for them, the rabbit never died – that is, they never had children together. They lived together in midtown Manhattan, until he died in 2008.
But Meg only began sharing the story of this part of her life about 10 years ago, after Ira died, when she read a New York Times article about early pregnancy testing which didn’t mention her. She realized she should probably start telling people.
Now, there’s a play about her life. It’s called Predictor. Meg’s original prototype – the one she fashioned from the box of paper clips – it’s now in a collection at the Smithsonian Museum. And these days, a lot of people like me come knocking on her door to ask her about this thing that happened 60 years ago.
MUSIC: Wonder Cycle, Chris Zabriskie
Justine Paradis: Why should a woman have the ability to test for a pregnancy at home?
Meg Crane: Yeah. I think there's so many reasons. So many. Um, first of all, if you think you're pregnant… Whatever your situation is… you should know just the joy of finding this out, or the opposite, of finding this out yourself is important, number one, and knowing it early. Um, if you want to have this baby and you're happy about that… take care of yourself and what's coming. And certainly today that's another story again… you have to know right away if you're planning to do anything other than have the baby…
Justine Paradis: It's such a particular moment in the bathroom that I think so many of us have experienced this, this private moment where you might be finding out in either direction something that could be life changing.
Meg Crane: Yeah. Life changing. Yes. Either way. Right. It's a major moment when you find out or decide this…
Justine Paradis: Well, I know I said this on the phone to you, but, um. I just, I feel so grateful. Thank you for pushing to do this.
Meg Crane: Thank you. Really. Like the chance to – because I'm, you know, whatever's happening in, in plays and movies, they're not going to be the actual story. You know, it's sort of – thank you for the chance to do that. And, um, yeah.
MUSIC SWELL
Nate Hegyi: Producer Justine Paradis. To see pictures of Meg Crane, and Predictor: the pioneering home pregnancy test… go to outsideinradio dot org.
MUSIC: Waltz and Fury, Blue Dot Sessions
That’s it for our dark magic show today... I’m Nate Hegyi, and this episode was produced and reported by me, Kate Dario, Marina Henke, and Justine Paradis.
It was edited by our executive Houdini, Taylor Quimby. Our staff also includes Felix Poon. Rebecca Lavoie is NHPR’s Director of rabbits On-Demand. Special thanks to Jesse Olzsynko-Gryn and David Bowser.
Hard pivot here, but if you’re going to be in the New Hampshire area on May 2nd, check out NHPR’s 3rd Annual Climate Summit. It’s going to be at St. Anselm College in Manchester, and we’ve got a great lineup of speakers and breakout sessions, followed by a trivia night.
Some of the Outside/In crew will be there - and also it’s FREE, but you do have to register. We’ve got a link to learn more in the show notes.
Music in this episode by Blue Dot Sessions, Chris Zabriskie, Cody High, and Dozeoff.
Outside/In is a production of New Hampshire Public Radio.