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Male pregnancy

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This article is about pregnancy in male organisms. For the sympathetic condition which occurs in some future fathers, see Couvade.
File:MalePregnancy poster.jpg
Poster released by the Family Planning Association of Victoria, Australia in the 1970s, advocating condom use, by featuring a fictitious male pregnancy.

Male pregnancy is the carrying of one or more embryos or fetuses by the male of any species inside their bodies. The majority of all pregnancies in the animal kingdom are carried by female organisms. In most heterogamous species, the males produce the spermatazoa and rarely host the zygote.

Speculation on possibility of pregnancy in male humans

The first uterine transplant was performed in Saudi Arabia in 2000, from one woman to another. This advance drew speculation about the possibility of a male receiving a womb transplant, and bearing a child from the transplanted womb. Womb transplants to males have been successfully performed in animals.[1][2]

Robert Winston, a British doctor who specializes in fertility, speculates that surgical intervention may make it possible for a man to sustain a pregnancy. This has never been attempted.[3] Winston posits that an embryo could be implanted in a man's abdomen, with the placenta attached to an internal organ such as the bowel, and it could be later delivered by Caesarean section. However, other experts express serious misgivings about the safety of the process.[4] In Britain, doctors would have to obtain permission to carry out the treatment from the the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority.


Two comedy films centered around the theme of such an event in humans, Rabbit Test (1978) and Junior (1994), have been released. The latter's attempts are somewhat scientifically feasible; the former does not address the matter. Television episodes and series have featured such pregnancies as a result of alien-human interaction, including Futurama, American Dad!, Alien Nation, Dilbert and the episode "Unexpected" of Star Trek: Enterprise, as well as in the computer game The Sims 2.

  • If a "Sim" (a human simulation from the computer game The Sims 2) stargazes with a telescope, he/she may be abducted by aliens. If it is an adult male, he will get pregnant with an alien baby. Likewise, the Sim will eventually give birth like female Sims do.
  • In an episode of Charmed, Leo becomes pregnant with Piper's baby for a short term.
  • In the first episode of Torchwood Captain Jack mentions that he once got pregnant.
  • In an episode of Red Dwarf, Lister becomes pregnant after visiting a parallel universe where male and female are reversed and he has sex with his counterpart.
  • An episode of Sliders depicts a world where men carry children to term because women lost the ability in a catastrophic disaster.
  • The Cosby Show's sixth season features a dream sequence episode where a volcanic eruption releases spores causing male pregnancy and several characters fall victim; they ultimately give birth to nonhuman objects such as a model sailboat and a submarine sandwich.
  • In the movie Billy Madison, Billy makes a wisecrack about Eric getting pregnant (referring him to being a potential soccer player)
  • In the sitcom Step by Step, Frank and J.T. make a bet with Carol and Dana that they can handle being pregnant better than women by stuffing really heavy objects in their shirts and walking around like that for a few days...they ultimately give up and lose.
  • Sam Beckett occupies the body of a pregnant woman during an episode of Quantum Leap and at the show's conclusion gives birth to the child. The Quantum Leap premise is such that along with Sam, and possibly his friend Al, the viewer is the only one capable of seeing actor Scott Bakula's physical form in place of the currently possessed body, prompting speculation as to what it must have looked like during the child's delivery. Nevertheless, the director of photography refrained from including footage of Sam's genital area.

Thematically, pregnancy can be related to issues of parasitism and gender. Some science fiction writers have picked up on these issues, in "cross-gender" themes—e.g., Octavia Butler's Bloodchild. Lois McMaster Bujold's Ethan of Athos features an all-male society in which men use artificial wombs, but experience many of the psychological effects of pregnancy (anticipation, anxiety, etc.). In Marge Piercy's feminist utopian novel Woman on the Edge of Time, neither men nor women get pregnant, but men may take drugs to lactate and nurse the infant; the experience of "pregnancy" and the woman-only experience of nursing were sacrificed for gender equality.[5] In the Internet comedy series Red vs. Blue, the character of Tucker is impregnated by a parasitic embryo from an alien creature. Roger Corman's B-film Night of the Blood Beast [2] (1958) featured a male scientist being impregnated by an alien.

Male pregnancy is frequently seen in fan fiction; such stories may be denoted as "mpreg", a term coined by two writers under the pseudonyms of Taleya Joinson and Texas Ranger, who created and maintained what is believed to be the first fan fiction archive dedicated to stories of this genre in 1998.[6] The pregnancies may be the result of advanced medical technology (e.g., experiments on Mulder from The X-Files), mystical pregnancies, magic or are unexplained.

Fetus in fetu

Men with parasitic twins are not pregnant, but there are some similarities. For example, the parasitic fetus sometimes attaches to the host with an umbilical cord and grows in the host's abdomen. In one rare case, an Indian man named Sanju Bhagat carried his twin brother until he was 36.

Mythology

Various mythologies have featured male characters birthing, but such events typically either take place in an entirely different fashion than an ordinary female pregnancy, such as Athena springing fully-formed from Zeus's forehead, or when the character has been rendered female in some way, such as the shapeshifter Loki turning into a mare to distract a stallion and ending up giving birth to Sleipnir.

Animals

A male seahorse takes and fertilises the ovum of the female, then bears the offspring. Pipefishes and seahorses are the only species in the animal kingdom to which the term "male pregnancy" has been applied.[7]

References

  1. ^ www.popsci.com Dr Robert Winston, a pioneer of in-vitro fertilization, bioethicist Glenn McGee
  2. ^ english.pravda.ru professor Mats Brannstrom
  3. ^ Findarticles
  4. ^ Findarticles
  5. ^ Piercy, Marge (1985-11-12). Woman on the Edge of Time. Fawcett. ISBN 0-449-21082-0. {{cite book}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
  6. ^ [1] Wayback archival reference
  7. ^ Jones, Adam G. (2003-10-14). "Male Pregnancy" (HTML). Current Biology. 13 (20): R791. {{cite journal}}: Check date values in: |date= (help); Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
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