Male Pregnancy: Has Science Gone Too Far?

There is currently an experiment going on where, through the miracle of IVF a man, Mr. Lee Mingwei, is pregnant.

I wish I could say that I was open enough to accept this and intellectually I am. I understand that this is just another step in human development. I predict a time when pregnant men will become a fact of life. It will be another thing for couples to decide on. Volvo or Volkswagen? Ranch house or Colonial? I have the babies or you?

I also understand that there is a lot that we do not know about our beginnings. The physical evidence of our existence goes back only so far. Who knows what information has been destroyed by time, natural disasters, human ignorance and greed. Maybe at one point men were able to have babies but for some reason, lost the ability to do so and this experiment is simply closing the circle.

Emotional acceptance, on the other, is another matter. It is hard to describe how I feel about this. It’s like this experiment is a direct attack on my womanhood. Women have always had the babies. It’s sort of our thing. Being the child bearers of the human race is one of the things that defined us. We have breasts, a vagina, a menstrual cycle and babies.

Enabling a man’s ability to have babies brings up the feeling that this is just one more thing that “they” are trying to take away from “us”. I suppose this feeling comes from centuries of oppression and sexism that continues to exist even in today’s “modern” world. Seriously, in parts of the world women are beaten for not covering their bodies, are being bought and sold like chattel and have no say about their destinies on this Earth.

Who knows, perhaps I’m looking at this from the wrong angle and in the end this will be turn out to be the thing that finally liberates us from our cultural shackles. What do you think?