Can a Man Get Pregnant by a Man
HOW TO GET A MAN PREGNANT
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November 27, 1994
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LAST WEDNESDAY, "JUNIOR," THE NEW MOVIE STARRING Arnold Schwarzenegger, opened in theaters around the country. The film centers on the experiences of Dr. Alex Hesse (played by Schwarzenegger), a scientist who has developed a wonder drug, called Expectane, that insures healthy pregnancies. The crux of the movie is that when Hesse loses financing for his research, he has a fertilized egg implanted in his body, takes his own wonder drug and becomes pregnant. From a scientific point of view, the plot of "Junior" is preposterous. You don't need a science-fiction drug. You may not need any kind of drug at all. We have all the technology we need right now to make a man pregnant. In fact, we had it all nine years ago, and we almost used it.
MY ADVENTURE IN MALE PREGNANCY BEGAN WITH A KINSEY INSTITUTE symposium in 1984. At that meeting, John Money, a professor of medical psychology and pediatrics at Johns Hopkins University, and Roger Gorski, a professor of anatomy and cell biology at U.C.L.A. Medical School, discussed technology that was already in place to create in a man the hormonal milieu of a pregnant woman. I joined forces with another writer, Kathleen McAuliffe, and we researched and wrote an article that ran in Omni magazine, the gist of which was that there was no insurmountable biological or technical barrier to a man carrying a baby to term.
Of course, there are some minor problems. Men don't produce the appropriate hormones. Men don't have ovaries and thus don't produce eggs. Men don't have wombs. Problems 1 and 2 were tackled long ago. The hormones can be supplied by injection, as Money and Gorski had described. The first "test-tube baby," Louise Joy Brown, was born in England in 1978 using in vitro technology. The egg, extracted from the mother and fertilized with the father's sperm in a dish, was inserted back into the mother and carried to term.
As for wombs, they're not totally necessary. Abdominal pregnancies -- outside the womb -- are rare, but they do happen about once in every 10,000 pregnancies. Few of these reach full term or result in live births. But some do. In May 1979, for example, an Auckland, New Zealand, woman named Margaret Martin gave birth to a healthy five-pound baby girl eight months after having had a hysterectomy. An errant fertilized egg had attached to her bowel and grown to term. About two dozen other cases of pregnancy after hysterectomy have been reported.
Abdominal pregnancies also occur in women who have uteruses when the placenta, which is produced partly by the fetus, attaches to something other than the womb. In August 1979, George Poretta attempted to perform an appendectomy on a Michigan woman suffering from stomach cramps. "I opened her up expecting to find an appendix," Poretta said, "and there was this tiny foot." The baby, Joseph Thomas Cwik, weighed 3 pounds 5 ounces. The male abdomen and female abdomen offer a similar environment, so this sort of pregnancy should be possible in males.
There have, in fact, been male pregnancies, al-Continued on page 55 though not, as far as anyone knows, in human beings. One physician and researcher, Cecil Jacobson, claimed to have transplanted a fertilized egg from a female baboon to the abdominal cavity of a male baboon in the mid-1960's at George Washington University Medical School. The embryo had attached itself to the omentum, a fatty tissue loaded with blood vessels that hangs down in front of the intestines like an apron. The male baboon carried the pregnancy well past four months; baboon gestation takes seven months.
Jacobson said he did not let the pregnancy go to term; nor did he publish the study in a scientific journal. It was a small part of a much broader project concerning pregnant women with diagnoses of ovarian cancer. He wanted to know at what stage you could remove the ovaries without causing a miscarriage. At the time, Jacobson was an important figure in the reproduction business. He was a pioneer in amniocentesis, the first (in 1967) to use the procedure to detect chromosome abnormality in an unborn child. He was also an early consultant to the Jones Institute for Reproductive Medicine at Eastern Virginia Medical School in Norfolk, Va., the most successful in vitro clinic in the United States.
The actual procedure for producing a male pregnancy would be straightforward. After in vitro fertilization of an egg, the developing embryo would be inserted through a small incision in the abdominal cavity. Luck would be required for the fertilized egg to implant in the omentum (a little bit of luck is needed even in normal pregnancies), but once it did and the placenta partly developed from the embryo, pregnancy would be under way. An endocrinologist could administer hormones to keep gestation going. Finally, the baby would be delivered via laparotomy, not unlike a Caesarean section.
The article we wrote ran in the December 1985 Omni. Among those who wrote in, volunteering for a male pregnancy experiment were a female-to-male transsexual, a childless couple from Portland, Me. (the wife couldn't safely carry a baby), a male-to-female transsexual and a reader who simply wanted to be the first pregnant man. Dustin Hoffman, who had just made the movie "Tootsie," in which he impersonates a woman, called to ask for a prepublication copy of the article.
IT WAS AT THIS POINT THAT I FACED temptation. I had fallen in love with the notion of male pregnancy. I couldn't let it go. I kept in touch with Jacobson and finally popped the question: If I could raise the money from a private source, would he undertake a secret experiment to make a man pregnant? He agreed immediately, despite the fact that for publication he had stated that male pregnancy would be an "abuse" of the technology, which he said would more properly be applied to women with no uterus. Over the course of several phone calls, Jacobson laid out a cautious plan for the experiment.
My next stop was Bob Guccione, founder of Omni, who agreed instantly to finance the project. I said I couldn't give him any definitive costs, but $500,000 seemed like a modest sum to get the project off the ground. As for volunteers, several Omni readers had already lined up, offering themseves to science. Jacobson and I had pretty much decided that we wanted a married man whose wife couldn't, for whatever reason, carry a baby to term.
Here was an opportunity not only to get an exclusive on a great story but to create that story myself. I thought about the scientific and ethical furor it would cause. I looked forward to experiencing the euphoria scientists report when they have participated in a ground-breaking experiment. More important, I looked forward to an enormous book advance. I contacted a literary agent who specialized in science books; she confirmed that, indeed, the exclusive story of a secret experiment that resulted in a man giving birth would be worth a lot of money. She said it was the most exciting idea she had heard since she sold "In His Image," a 1978 book by David Rorvik about the first cloning of a human being. "In His Image" was later judged to be a fraud in a Federal District Court in Philadelphia.
Then I began to think about the risks involved. Advanced abdominal pregnancy kills 10 percent of the women who experience it and 70 percent of their babies. What would it do to a man? And his baby? The placental sack can twist and turn, doing the same to intestines. There was the possibility of hemorrhage. And there was the possibility that the whole project would succeed, leaving the "mother" and the child to deal with the problem of what to call a male mom. Like someone waking up from an intoxicating daydream, I came to my senses. I quietly let the project drop. And that was that. Or almost.
In 1991, I was reminded of my unfulfilled plans when Cecil Jacobson was arraigned on 53 felony charges for, among other things, secretly inseminating women at his fertility clinic with his own sperm. And then, when I heard about "Junior," I began to look into the subject again. I called Roger Gorski, who still believes a man could become pregnant. "I'm surprised it hasn't been done, but I'm glad it hasn't." Landrum Shettles, a pioneer of in vitro fertilization and other birth technologies, now retired, also still thinks it will be done someday, although, he says, "it would be more appropriate to try the technique on women who have had their uteri removed." On the other hand, "What's good for the goose is good for the gander."
David Haig, an evolutionary biologist at Harvard University who studies maternal-fetal interactions, says, "I see no reason why it [ male pregnancy ] can't occur." Haig has demonstrated that the fetal-maternal relationship involves conflict as well as cooperation. "Fetuses may sometimes take more resources than the mother is willing to give. The fetus takes without asking."
Nor is the womb anything special to the human placenta, which invades the mother's blood vessels and draws out nutrients. "The placenta has evolved to take nutrients from the bloodstream," Haig says. "It doesn't care whether the blood is in the liver, the intestines, or the uterus." But does the placenta care whether it absorbs mother's blood or father's blood? "I see no reason why it wouldn't implant in males. Placentas are wonderful things."
Really making a man pregnant would require some respectable scientists to take big risks, of course. But stranger things have happened. For more than three decades, thousands of individuals have had sex change operations. But sex changes -- arguably more life changing than a pregnancy -- were still considered bizarre and distasteful in 1966 when John Money, Claude Migneon and Howard W. Jones made the decision at Johns Hopkins to go ahead with the first such documented operation in the United States. Howard Jones is the same surgeon now revered by infertile couples as director and founder of the aforementioned Jones Institute, producer of nearly 1,500 "test-tube babies." He is the same man who used Cecil Jacobson as a lecturer during the early years of the Jones in vitro clinic. People who push the envelope in the area of reproductive medicine and gender identity can find themselves vilified one year and lionized the next.
Two weeks ago, I was nonplused to learn from a man at Universal Pictures that the screenwriters of "Junior" had used our Omni article to figure out how to impregnate the film's hero. This knowledge has changed my life, especially my daily workouts at a body-builder's gym that has a decor that can only be described as "Early Schwarzenegger." Photographs of the half-naked muscle man adorn the walls like icons. I've always imagined him looking down condescendingly at my puny trapeziuses as I struggle with dumbbell shrugs. But now I think to myself: "Go ahead and smirk, Arnold. I'm the guy who got you pregnant."
Can a Man Get Pregnant by a Man
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/1994/11/27/magazine/how-to-get-a-man-pregnant.html