Question: is it possible for a man to becoe pregnant?? :s

Jon Copley answered on 20 Jun 2010:

Like all the best questions, this is a complicated one!

If you mean “is is possible for someone who is physically male to produce eggs, and then incubate a fetus inside their body?”, then the answer to the first part is “no”, but the answer to the second part is “maybe”.

Someone who is physically male can’t make eggs. It might one day be possible to take the DNA from one of their sperm cells, and transfer it into a donor egg that has had its own DNA removed – but I don’t think that’s possible at the moment.

However, it may be possible to transplant a developing fetus from a woman into a man’s body, so that he carries the preganacy (but the egg would not have been his, so that’s not quite the same as “a man becoming pregnant” from scratch – and clearly the baby would have to be born at the end by a caesarian section operation). Of course, a man doesn’t have a womb, but it may still be possible to graft a fetus and placenta to develop inside his abdomen.

I don’t think this has been done yet, and there are likely to be lots of medical complications with the body “rejecting” the transplant and attacking it with its immune system. But some scientists who specialise in reproductive medicine (such as Robert Winston, who also presents some TV science programmes) have said that they think it could be done.

However – and this is where it gets complicated – there have been cases where people who are *legally* recognised as male have become pregnant and given birth. Whether someone is “male” or “female” doesn’t actually depend on what their body is like – it depends on their brain / mind.

There are some people who are born with minds whose gender doesn’t match their body – they know, for example, since their earliest memory, that they are “male” even if they have been born with a “female” body. And incidentally that’s not the same as being gay – for example it’s not that they are attracted to women that makes them “male”, but much more fundamental than that.

This is now recognised as a medical condition, and people with that condition can apply to be “legally” recognised as, for example, “male”, before they have surgery to correct the condition of their body and become as “physically” male as possible (and so live the rest of their lives without the distress of being trapped in the wrong body).

(It’s important to realise it is not really someone’s “choice” to decide to change their physical gender – someone doesn’t just think “oh, I think I’ll try becoming a man today!” – but rather that they were born with the mind of the other gender – in that sense, they have never been a “woman”).

There have been a couple of cases where someone who has already been legally recognised as male because of this condition has become pregnant, and given birth, before completing the complex surgical procedures to make their body “male”.

So that’s why the question is complicated – the full answer is “not yet” if you mean “physically”, but actually “yes” if you mean “legally”!

Ok, perhaps the next question that springs to mind here is “why would a man want to become pregnant?”. But if my wife became pregnant and a complication with the pregnancy threatened her life, and there was no other way to save the fetus other than transplanting it into me to complete the pregnancy, then that would be a reason for me.