Pregnant men: hard to stomach?
Medically, it's do-able. Morally, it's debatable. But on a purely emotional level, the very
idea of male pregnancy is difficult to accept. Why would a man want to be pregnant? And
is 'the world's first pregnant man' all that he seems? William Leith reports.
The Daily Telegraph
Last week, Oprah Winfrey introduced her studio audience to Thomas Beatie, perhaps her
strangest guest ever. 'Thomas,' she said, 'is... a... pregnant... man.' Then she blinked, as if
stunned by the whole thing. 'Come on out, Thomas,' said Oprah. People in the audience
clapped, as they usually do. But some didn't. Some couldn't bring themselves to clap.
They sat, motionless, not knowing where to look. You should have seen the looks on their
faces.
The thing is, that's exactly how I felt. I found the whole concept deeply disturbing. Lots of
people do. The other day, commenting on this case, a gay comedian said, 'I'm not saying
it's weird, but even the stork threw up.' That was, more or less, how I felt. A pregnant man?
Dear God.
I thought it might be a hoax. I hoped it was a hoax. But why? What was my reaction based
on?
Beatie, 34, from Oregon, looked like a chirpy chap with a light beard. Much to my relief, it
turned out that he'd started life as a girl, but felt that he was actually a man trapped in a
girl's body. So he, or she, took a course of testosterone and had an operation to remove
his, or her, breasts. Having dragged himself across the threshold of maleness, he got
married to a woman. She'd had a hysterectomy. They wanted a baby, so he was doing the
decent thing.Wasn't he?
There were clips of Beatie flexing his muscles, looking like the sort of guy who might be
interested in skateboarding. Then there was a clip of him showing off his neat bump. 'I'm a
pregnant person,' he told Oprah. He said that getting pregnant hadn't made him feel
suddenly more feminine - it hadn't, for instance, made him want to shave his legs.
Oprah felt Beatie's bump. She commented on the fact that, for somebody who was six
months pregnant, it was a neat bump.
'I'm a man,' said Beatie. 'I just happen to be a pregnant man.'
Watching all this, I began to have a certain amount of sympathy for him. But I still hoped it
was a hoax. I thought of James Frey, who had also been a guest on Oprah when he wrote
about his addictions to alcohol and crack. Frey, it turned out, had written stuff that wasn't
strictly true. Later, he made another appearance on the Oprah show, this time to
apologise. News headlines about Beatie's case invariably included a couple of queasily
sceptical quote marks - as in ' "Pregnant" man appears on Oprah'.
Page 1 of 6
No offence to Beatie, but those quote marks should actually be around the word 'man'. His
female reproductive organs are still intact; legally he's a man, but biologically, in many
ways that count, he's still very much a woman. And he's not even the first transgender
male to become pregnant - that honour belongs to Matt Califia-Rice, who gave birth to a
baby boy back in 1999. Despite the headlines, the world is still waiting for the first true
male pregnancy.
But why was my instinct not to trust Beatie? Partly because the last time I read something
about a pregnant man, the fellow in question, Lee Mingwei, turned out to be a character
invented by the performance artist Virgil Wong. He was doing what all performance artists
do - trying to attract attention to himself by doing something weird. And there aren't many
things weirder than being a pregnant man.
For the past 10 years Wong's character Mingwei has appeared on a website, telling us
what was supposedly happening to him - he was a man, he was pregnant, this was
technically possible using cutting-edge medical techniques, and so on. In the real world,
he began walking the streets of New York wearing a fake belly ('no one ever looked at me
twice - maybe they thought I was fat'). But then he didn't post anything about the actual
birth. There was no actual birth. After a while, it became apparent that Wong was having a
laugh. And also, possibly, making a serious point or two. In any case, he'd got our
attention. (A little too much attention, in fact - he had to move home following death threats
from Christian groups.)
There was, of course, Arnold Schwarzenegger's film Junior, in which the future governor of
California played the part of Dr Alex Hesse, a pumped-up scientist working on a wonder
drug, Expectane, that helped women get pregnant. When his research funding dried up,
Hesse took the drug himself and got pregnant. Ludicrous, of course, one would think. But
the film was based on actual research recounted in a 1985 article in the American
magazine Omni. The author was a scientist called Dick Teresi. 'You don't need a science
fiction drug,' he later wrote.' You may not need any kind of drug at all. We have all the
technology we need right now to make a man pregnant.' We'll come back to that.
But why is Beatie's situation so difficult to stomach? Here was somebody, so he said, who
wanted a child, who was married, and whose wife, Nancy, could not give birth herself.
Wasn't what Beatie wanted - a family - the same thing lots of other people want? How
could I be appalled at that?
But there it was. I was. Male pregnancy was something I found hard to think about - and
also hard to talk about. I'd been interested in this subject before I heard of Thomas Beatie.
Often, people ask me what I'm working on. If the answer is 'vacuum cleaners', I will launch
into a detailed discussion about vacuum cleaners. But when it came to the subject of male
pregnancy, I kept trying to change the subject.
After a while, I forced myself to talk about it. Men, I discovered, felt the way I did. Women
were slightly different. Some laughed. Their position was that men would not be able to go
through with pregnancy. Men, they said, couldn't hack it. But what if they could, I said.
They couldn't, they replied. Do you know what pregnancy is like?
Page 2 of 6
Well, up to a point. You feel sick. You put on weight. You 'bloom'. You get cravings. You
feel big and unwieldy. You give birth.
Even then, it's not quite over. There is lactation, and then weight you can't shift.
Sometimes there is depression. But men could cope with this, couldn't they? After all, they
go to war. They sit in muddy trenches, with bombs raining down on them.
No! said the women, only half-joking. Or maybe not joking at all. Men could not cope with
pregnancy: some of them cited research, or possibly folklore, which said that women, who
are built to cope with 40-week stretches of discomfort, are also better able to cope with
other ailments - colds, sore throats and the like. Whereas men take to their beds at the
slightest thing.' Men are big sissies,' was the consensus.
In any case, nobody seemed positive about the idea of male pregnancy. It mostly made
them feel threatened. And that's the interesting thing.
This is not the mild threat of other gender-shuffling ideas - concepts such as the househusband, the male nanny, the female paratrooper, the female President of the United
States. These things are a form of progress. Male pregnancy does not feel like progress. It
feels threatening, and horrifying, and appalling.
When I talked to fertility experts about male pregnancy, they seemed to feel the same way.
Oh, it's possible, they said. How? Well, think of ectopic pregnancy. This is what happens
when an embryo is fertilised outside the womb. Mostly, ectopic pregnancies fail. But
occasionally, a healthy baby is born after an ectopic pregnancy. Theoretically, then, an
embryo could be implanted into a man, along with some kind of hormone package that
would encourage the placenta to grow. And then the man could keep taking hormones progesterone and oestrogen.
It's possible, they said. The man would not feel well. He would develop breasts. He might
have severe mood-swings and cravings. At the end, he would have to have a caesarean.
The only real obstacle is that the placenta would need to attach itself to the blood supply
via an organ, making the birth potentially dangerous (for the man, not the baby). But that's
solvable by placing the baby in a uterus - which may soon be possible thanks to the
development of uterine transplants.
But no one I spoke to sounded positive. And remember, these are fertility doctors. These
are people who have spent their whole lives working, against the grain of popular opinion,
on long-shot ideas. These are the promoters of IVF and surrogacy, of taking sperm and
putting it here, of taking eggs and putting them there, always pushing the envelope of
possibility.
According to Dick Teresi, the inspiration for the Schwarzenegger film, what you'd have to
do to impregnate a man is as follows: fertilise an egg in a test-tube. Then insert it into a
part of the male abdomen called the omentum. This is 'a fatty tissue loaded with blood
vessels that hangs down in front of the intestines'. (Thomas Beatie was impregnated by
his wife, with the help of donated sperm and a device normally used for feeding birds.) In
fact, one researcher, Cecil Jacobson, claimed to have impregnated a male baboon using
Page 3 of 6
this method in the 1960s, at George Washington University Medical School, though he
hadn't allowed the pregnancy to go to term. Teresi said that, for a time, he wanted to be
the first scientist to get a man pregnant. Bob Guccione, who founded Omni magazine,
agreed to back the project, but Teresi got cold feet. The whole thing, he decided, would be
too dangerous - and too weird.
'There was the possibility,' he wrote, 'that the project would succeed, leaving the ''mother"
and child to deal with the problem of what to call a male mum. Like someone waking up
from an intoxicating daydream, I came to my senses.'
I mentioned the concept of male pregnancy to Ian Craft, director of the London Fertility
Centre. Craft and his team were the first to report that an egg could be successfully
fertilised with sperm taken directly from the testis. He is the man who invented and
developed the technique of 'sperm retrieval by needle aspiration'. He also showed that
'non-motile' sperm - sperm that appear to be dead - were not necessarily dead, and
seemed to come alive after spending 24 hours in an in vitro environment.
But male pregnancy? 'It's bizarre,' he said. 'Why would a man want to do this? It doesn't
make sense. You can do many innovative things, but trying to change the whole male
environment... it's so risky. I can't see why you'd want to do it in the first place. Why a man
would want to have a baby I can't possibly contemplate. To me, it defies credibility that
anybody would think about doing it. The people who are considering doing it have lost the
plot. The plot is that women give birth to children - not men.'
Dr Gillian Lockwood, of the Midland Fertility Service, confirmed that male pregnancy
wasn't a new idea, and might be possible. 'But the consequences for the unfortunate man!
It would be hormone soup. And the delivery would possibly be life-threatening. I don't think
you'll get many candidates.' She added: 'I can't imagine any doctor who would co-operate.
It's unnecessary and it's unethical. If a couple need to have a surrogate, they can use a
surrogate mother without any great risk of harm.'
I talked to Dr Simon Fischel of the Centre for Assisted Reproduction in Nottingham, who
has said that there is 'no reason why a man could not carry a child. The placenta provides
the necessary hormonal conditions, so it doesn't have to be inside a woman'. A few years
ago he'd been cited as having been approached by three couples who were interested in
the male half of the couple getting pregnant. But he hadn't gone ahead with any treatment.
'The man's life would be seriously at risk,' he told me. There would be issues with the
Hippocratic Oath.
And would the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority, which regulates fertility
clinics, sanction it? Unlikely, he said.
So it's possible, but dangerous. A man, pumped full of hormones, would begin to take on a
womanly shape - he'd be the recipient of Gillian Lockwood's 'hormone soup'. These high
levels of hormones might be carcinogenic, and they might have other long-term effects we
don't know about. At the end of this process, having been closely monitored and scanned,
he'd have a Caesarian, and then a baby. The Caesarian, of course, would be complicated
Page 4 of 6
by the fact that it wouldn't be a uterus the surgeon would be cutting open - it would be the
man's intestines.
Then the pregnant man would become a father. Or rather, a mother. And here's the thing.
We find this unpalatable, but not because of the dangers involved, the strange technology,
the cutting-edge operations. It's because it changes something fundamental about the way
we see the world. Or rather, about the way we feel. Thinking about a pregnant man is
difficult on an emotional level, because our emotions are formed, according to evolutionary
biologists, by one crucial factor. And that's whether we have the brain chemistry of, on the
one hand, a sperm shooter, or, on the other, an egg protector. These are the two halves of
our emotional world. Even if you're gay, say the evolutionary biologists, you're either a
sperm-shooter or an egg-protector at heart.
But a pregnant man? A shooter who is also a protector? It shocks us on a very basic level.
Naturally, it does. The way you feel about the world is guided by your primal urges, and
the most important of these is the urge to reproduce. This, to quote the American gender
expert Joe Quirk from his book Sperm are from Men, Eggs are from Women, is because
'whatever works out best for genes ends up constructing our emotions'.
Think of human drives, says Quirk - 'Our hunger for love, our ambitions, our desire to
belong, our urge to make beautiful things, our need to talk, our voracious curiosity, our fear
of death, our longing for transcendence, our willingness to die for our community, our ache
for God. All our qualities evolved to the extent they served the reproduction of genes.' And
what is the most basic thing that defines you as an animal driven by the urge to replicate?
It's not whether you are a hunter or a gatherer. It's not whether you want to be the leader
of your tribe, or even President of the United States. These are secondary concerns. The
big thing is whether or not you can get pregnant.
Pregnancy is a huge risk. If it can happen to you, this risk defines the way you relate to
other people. As the evolutionary biologist David Buss says, 'Because women in our
evolutionary past risked enormous investment as a consequence of having sex, evolution
favoured women who were highly selective about their mates.'
How much investment is that? Well, as Joe Quirk points out, being pregnant costs a
woman around 80,000 calories. That's the same energy expenditure as a thousand-mile
run. And that's just the start - after that, there's all the feeding and caring, for many years
to come. Compare this with the man's investment in having sex - it's about the same,
calorie-wise, as watching the cup final while sitting on a sofa. That's why men relate to the
world in a different way from women. In her lifetime, a woman produces around 400 eggs.
A man, on the other hand, produces billions of sperm. There is never a sperm shortage.
So, because men in our evolutionary past risked almost no investment as a consequence
of having sex, evolution favoured men who sowed their seed far and wide. Things aren't
quite as simple as that, of course, because evolution also favoured men who provided for
their children.
Pregnancy makes all the difference. Women can get pregnant, so they are hard-wired to
be more sexually cautious, and to favour slightly older men who have proved themselves
Page 5 of 6
as providers. And, according to the feminist writer Susan Mausart, to organise the home
environment so well that men don't want to leave it; and according to the psychologist
Simon Baron-Cohen, to be great empathisers and multitaskers.
Men, on the other hand, can't get pregnant, so they have an evolutionary interest in having
sex with as many women as possible. But, since women are hard-wired to be sexually
cautious, men must compete with each other for female attention. Eggs, remember, are
scarce. Eggs are expensive. It's sperm that's cheap.
Quirk explains that women need to evolve ways of making men stay around to help them.
That, he says, is why they're so complicated. 'It is not in an egg-maker's interest to be
figured out,' he says. 'The clitoris and female psychology are designed to stay just out of
reach, just a little teasing, so a man will bond through sexuality, fall in love, and stick
around to raise the offspring.'
We live in a world that is strictly divided into a male half and a female half. That's why
Thomas Beatie throws us a curveball. That's why we are so confused and disturbed by the
idea of a pregnant man, even when he did start out as a woman and will still give birth as a
woman. The prejudice runs deep. Beatie says that one doctor agreed to treat him, but
asked him to shave his facial hair. In one sense, that sounds like an appalling reaction. But
you can see the doctor's point of view.
Page 6 of 6