In Vitro Fertility Goddess

If at this point you don't believe me, google ‘pregnant man' to get the low down. He lives in Oregon and the story broke in a transgender publication ‘The Advocate'.

How did he get pregnant, you ask. Well apparently he used an anonymous sperm donor. And why, then, was he the one that got to use the turkey baster and not his wife?

Well she had a hysterectomy about twenty years earlier so was unable to bear a child.

‘Over to you, honey'. So he stopped having his shots and presto! Months later he was with child. Except for the article in the TG publication which reveals that he's expecting a girl in July, accompanied by a photo that looks like Demi Moore with a beard, he's keeping a pretty low profile.

A neighbour meantime has scoffed at the news, saying if he pushed his stomach out a bit he too could look six months pregnant. Which brings me to the question, how many of the blokes you see with expanded girths are not, as previously believed, men with beer guts, but are in fact transgender folk with child?

But I digress. What does it all mean? Well firstly that there are quite a few women out there who are struggling to fall pregnant who'd have cause to be jealous. I mean, ‘I just threw my testosterone pills out the window for a few months, went to a sperm bank and made a withdrawal and next minute I was pregnant.' We girls should be so lucky!

Next from the wife's point of view, at least they didn't have to find a surrogate to carry the child, it's all been kept in the family as such. Being someone who's had a hysterectomy herself, I wouldn't mind having a ‘husband' that could have a child for us. But then this fellow's not really a husband in every sense of the word, not from the waist down anyway. I don't think I could make that trade-off.

And of course there's the absolute humdinger of an answer this couple face when they get the ‘Mummy, where did I come from?' question.

As for the medical bit, he's having a hard time finding an obstetrician to deliver.

So you have to ask why they'd even begin to attempt to put themselves through this. But I guess the long-seated hunger for a child leads us to do all sorts of crazy things.

Whether the scoffing neighbour is right and Thomas's stomach is the result of a long-seated hunger for a hamburger and a beer rather than a child remains to be seen. Trust Oprah to have put an end to the junk-food/beer drinking conspiracy.

Jodi Panayotov