Jen Graves recently wrote in Seattle’s The Stranger about her desire to have a baby with her partner, Patrick — and she wants Patrick to carry the baby:
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).
We also learn in this piece that our own Glenn McGee has considered becoming pregnant. Here’s what he told Graves:
“Having reviewed all the science, what we know is this,” says McGee, now director of the Alden March Bioethics Institute in Albany, New York. We talked a couple of weeks ago on the phone. “These little creatures are very much self-determining, much more than we knew even 10 years ago. So could they be born? Yeah, probably.”
How would a man get the hormones he needs?
“The embryo sends signals that change the hormone levels in the body; males are capable of producing almost enough of the required hormones necessary to carry a baby on their own. If they didn’t, they’d take some pills — so not an issue.”
Would taking the baby out cause hemorrhaging?
“In the time since this issue was hypothesized in the ’70s and ’80s, based on research in the ’50s, lots of things have changed. One is there’ve been many, many, many, many more successful births in women where the baby was in the gut — upwards of 200 recorded in the medical literature. That means that for a man, it’s the same sort of thing.”
The science isn’t the problem.
“I would have been first in line, I really would have,” McGee tells me. “I actually thought it would be kind of cool to be pregnant — I was jealous, in a way.”
We may have to follow up on this.
-Greg Dahlmann
cover photo from The Stranger