Free Republic

In November, 25-year-old Japanese citizen Midori Nishida was checking into a flight to Saipan, a US island in the Pacific, where she was going to visit her parents. She wasn't pregnant, and said so on a check-in questionnaire, but airline staff made her take a pregnancy test anyways before she was allowed to board. The Wall Street Journal reports that Nishida was asked to give permission to an authorized medical provider to conduct a "fit-to-fly" assessment, and the form said it was for women who had a body size or shape resembling a pregnant woman. Nishida told the Wall Street...

The University of Copenhagen in Denmark is home to a unique collection of Ancient Egyptian papyrus manuscripts. A large part of the collection has not yet been translated, leaving researchers in the dark about what they might contain. "A large part of the texts are still unpublished. Texts about medicine, botany, astronomy, astrology, and other sciences practiced in Ancient Egypt," says Egyptologist Kim Ryholt, Head of the Carlsberg Papyrus Collection at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark... "It's totally unique for me to be able to work with unpublished material. It doesn't happen in many places around the world," says PhD...

Used positive pregnancy tests can be found for sale all over the Internet. And as CBS 2’s Alice Gainer reported, those involved said people are snapping them up – with less-than-ethical motivations. One mother from Dallas did not want her identity revealed, but she does want people to buy her positive pregnancy tests. She talked about one woman who took her up on the offer. “She wanted to trick him into thinking she was pregnant, so he would drop everything so I gave her two tests,” the woman said.

Imported African animals released into the wild spread chytridiomycosis. When improved pregnancy tests were developed in the 1960s, the advance came with an unexpected side effect: a role in the spread of chytridiomycosis, a lethal fungal disease that has wiped out hundreds of species of frogs. A study published in PLoS ONE this week tracks the amphibian fungus that causes the disease, Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis, to an important reservoir in the Americas — African clawed frogs (Xenopus laevis)1. The frogs were used in pregnancy tests until the early 1970s, as it was known that the animals ovulated when exposed to a...

Nevada City, CA -- The parents of a 12-year-old girl have filed a lawsuit against a California school district after local school officials forced their daughter to submit to a pregnancy test. Attorneys with the Pacific Justice Institute are representing the student and her parents, who had no knowledge of the test.

AUSTIN, Texas -- A 15-year-old San Marcos girl and her father have filed a federal lawsuit against her school nurse, who allegedly forced the girl to take a pregnancy test. The lawsuit claims that nurse Dyanna Eastwood called the girl to her office and told her that a student at another school claimed he impregnated her. Eastwood insisted the girl take the test, according to the lawsuit. The girl said she did not have sex with the boy and denied that she was pregnant. The girl's lawyer also said she was not pregnant. The suit, which was filed Wednesday in...