Maurice Harold Friedman, a medical doctor and reproductive-physiology researcher who developed the "rabbit test" to determine pregnancy, died Friday at his home in Sarasota, Fla. He was 87 years old.

He died of cancer after a long illness under the care of the Hospice of Southwest Florida, said one of his three daughters, Barbara F. Mishkin, of Chevy Chase, Md.

It was while teaching physiology at the University of Pennsylvania Medical School in the early 1930's that Dr. Friedman developed his test for pregnancy, which became widely known as the "rabbit test."

In the test, a woman's urine sample was injected into a female rabbit. If the woman was pregnant, the urine would contains hormones that would cause formations, known as corpora lutea and corpora hemorrhagica, in the rabbit's ovaries. The popular belief that the rabbit died as a result of a positive test itself was not true. Rather, the rabbit would be killed before a laboratory cut it open to determine whether the ovary formations had developed. 'It's Highly Reliable'