Bars and restaurants in Minnesota will soon be offering dispensers in the ladies’ rooms that provide $3 pregnancy tests in an effort to prevent who think they may be pregnant from consuming alcohol.
Healthy Brains for Children, a nonprofit that seeks to prevent fetal alcohol syndrome, says the first dispenser will be installed at Pub 500 in Mankato, MN. They plan to have 100 dispensers in the “Twin Cities” area soon.
Founder Jody Crowe doesn’t want to just stop in Minnesota though, he wants these cheap, dispensible tests available “worldwide in locations where women can test before drinking alcohol rather than waiting until a month or two into the pregnancy.” They also want to get the tests in the bathrooms of places like gas stations, malls, fitness centers.
These bathroom dispensed tests offer a degree of privacy that women usually don’t get when purchasing pregnancy test, especially if they live in a small town where everyone knows who they are. Even if you use the self-checkout line and you don’t know anyone in the store, it can be quite an embarrassing thing to carry a pregnancy test through the store, sometimes stores even lock the tests up, which protects the stores from embarrassed women stealing them, but makes the women trying to purchase them even more embarrassed.
You can always order them online, but then you have to wait for them to ship, and even if it’s just one or two days, that can be an eternity. It’s much easier to just slip into a public bathroom and check. Hopefully these test dispensers will be IN the stalls, to amp up the privacy aspect. The biggest question here is the accuracy of the tests, especially at early stages. Even the best tests will have mistakes sometimes, and the rate of accuracy is affected by whether or not they’re used correctly. Even with some potential inaccuracies it’s still a good idea.
