It’s meant to be the big definer, the thing we can’t do, the rock where a thousand earnest chats about sexual equality have foundered. And both sides claim it, a kind of divine wild card that throws the argument so off-beam you don’t know how to pick it up again. “That’s the thing, I’ll never understand women, I can’t give birth.” Or: “That’s the thing, you’ll never understand women, you can’t give birth.”
Or as my wife put it when painfully, clumsily and, indeed, self-consciously gravid: “God, if men were the ones who got pregnant, we’d all hear about it soon enough.” I’m hearing about it now, I thought to myself for about the tenth time that day. Naturally I kept that thought to myself; I was partly responsible, after all.
And now it appears men can get pregnant. A few years ago I sold an article to GQ magazine on the promise of its catchline alone: “How to be a pregnant man.” The gag was that this wasn’t meant at all literally – it was all about a man’s reactions to his wife’s pregnancy. (This, let me remind you, was a while ago, when such pieces still had a trace of novelty to them.)
Nowadays, though, a tag like that – “How to be a pregnant man” – would be taken literally. We have the technology. I remember when that phrase announced a popular television show about a man whose bionic implants gave him Superman-like abilities in the areas of running, jumping and fighting villains.
Roll on the future, I thought, and it has, but all that technology seems to have done is given us the chance to get pregnant. According to a report by Lord (Robert) Winston, the world authority on IVF, it is now theoretically possible for an embryo to be stuck inside a man’s abdomen and come to term.
Three weeks after he announced this, the Sunday Times reported that “another fertility expert, Dr Simon Fishel, director of the Centre for Assisted Reproduction in Nottingham, has now been approached by three British heterosexual couples seeking a male pregnancy”.
I stuck by western civilisation, the scientific heirs of the enlightenment, for this? Such, I would imagine, is the knee-jerk reaction all over the country. These days one suspects male motives for anything, often with good reason, but on hearing that there are men who want to become pregnant, we really become suspicious.
I remember, when my wife was pregnant for the first time, that she suggested I wear one of those empathy bellies – a sand-filled tits’n’tum deal designed to recreate the excruciating discomfort of advanced pregnancy. Now I am a liberal man, pretty right-on left-wing most of the time, but I almost surprised myself by the force of my refusal even to consider the idea. If I’d been smoking a cigar, I’d have blown the smoke in her face. An empathy belly was taking things too far. (What kind of vindictive sadist dreamed that one up, anyway? You can imagine the twisted thought process: “Why have one person staggering round the house with her back shot to pieces and her patience frayed past snapping point when you can have two?”)
But this is missing the point. Who can doubt that the couples approaching Dr Fishel were desperate to have a child and had either exhausted, or were on the point of exhausting, all other possibilities? Although I personally am not wholly convinced that the continuation of the human race is desirable, I cannot deny the agony of those who would like children but for one reason or another cannot have them.
But if we discount the business of a man wanting to become big with child because that is the only way he and his (presumably) female partner are going to have one that shares their DNA, then we are back in the realm of gross comedy, of interference with the Divine Plan.
(Compare this with sex-change operations, about which, it would seem, we are getting much more tolerant, and a good thing, too. There is a particular kind of conservative mind that imagines that such scientific techniques are not optional and off-puttingly tricky, but easy and on the verge of becoming compulsory. Such people should have the self-awareness to realise that they are protesting too much.)
We know the picture already: it was used in that advertising campaign in the 1970s, showing a glum-looking bloke about eight months gone; the idea being that if men were the ones to get pregnant then more care would be taken over family planning. One could go further and say that if men were the ones to get pregnant then that would be it as far as the human race was concerned: we just wouldn’t go through with it. It’s too horrible. It is at the extreme end of those other tasks – taking out the rubbish, cleaning the loo, painting the entire house from top to bottom – that men simply cannot be expected to do because doing them is, historically, ethically and biologically, women’s work.
Still, you have to salute human ingenuity, which never ceases to think of crazy things to do and then has a crack at actually carrying them out. Like Pot Noodles, or the atom bomb. Male pregnancy is a particularly crazy idea but at least it is about helping life along rather than seeking to extinguish it.
My wife says that science should spend less time on male pregnancy and more time modifying the male brain so that it can cope with more than 15 minutes’ childcare at a stretch. To which I say, steady on. Let’s not run before we can walk.
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