podcast.bioethics.net

Talking about male pregnancy

Reproductive technology has opened up a world of choices in how we go about becoming parents, but one part of the process that it hasn't changed is the fact that at some point a child has be carried by a woman. But what if it didn't have to be that way? What if both women and men could become pregnant? It's just that question writer Jen Graves asks in her piece "Getting Patrick Pregnant" for Seattle's The Stranger. In it, she examines the science that might make it possible for a man to carry a child -- but even more interestingly, she also explores the human side of this discussion by asking Patrick, her partner, whether he's willing to have their baby. Along the way, she gets the kind of reactions you'd expect... and a few that you probably wouldn't.

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Here's a clip from Jen's piece:

I met Patrick in the fall of 1995. By spring, we lived together. We were 20 years old and in college. My degrees are in English, but that entire year, I studied theory. Queer theory, feminist theory, critical theory. In one class, called Bodyworks, about cyborgs and organ transplants and plastic surgery and gender reassignment, my professor, Timothy Lenoir, mentioned that somebody in England was offering a million dollars to the first man who volunteered to get pregnant. "You'd be perfect," I told Patrick. He didn't disagree. We were outspoken feminists.

We spent the next decade following my career around the country. Patrick is patient, self-possessed, and much more nurturing than I am. A family story: When he was 3 years old, he and his mother were sitting and playing on the floor when she got a migraine. She explained to him that she had to lie down and close her eyes. He sat there, silently, for a half hour. He was three.

Sure, Patrick would be a great father, I've always thought. But he'd be an even better mother. Meanwhile, I am career-driven, impatient, and overbooked. I would work. He would stay home at least part-time. He would be the 51-percent parent, the one on speed dial for the doctor and the school, the one who passes along the German language he grew up speaking, the one who knows about science, seafaring knots, button sewing, making a sauce from roux, and inventing ways to build handmade gifts like wooden kaleidoscopes and coat racks (these are real specialties of his).

Jen says a class she took in college with Timothy Lenoir first introduced her to the idea of male pregnancy.

Artist Lee Mingwei has been working on an ongoing project in which he plays the role of a pregnant man.

music: "Ado Mutant" by Jankenpopp