Friday, April 04, 2008

'Pregnant dude': hoax? UPDATE: Maybe not

I wouldn't be blogging about the so-called "pregnant man," Thomas Beatie of Oregon, but methinks there is something wrong with "his" story. Here are two excerpts from an article on Yahoo! TV:

Beatie's wife Nancy said she inseminated him with a syringe using sperm purchased from a bank.


Okay, fine. This "man" apparently retained his female reproductive organs, and this is what you'd call the poor man's version of artificial insemination, BUT ...

The couple said an earlier attempt at pregnancy failed when he developed a tubal pregnancy, resulting in surgery that removed his Fallopian tubes.


If Thomas has no Fallopian tubes, how did an egg get from ovary to the uterus to wait for the syringe-introduced sperm? And why would an ectopic pregnancy call for removal of both tubes anyway? (Unless you had a twin ectopic pregnancy and both tubes were involved, which I imagine is rarer than being struck by lightning.)

Furthermore, I'm not a doctor but I have a family member who has gone through the throes of infertility treatments. All kinds of things can screw with your hormone levels, which must be just so to make conception possible. If he had been dosing himself with testosterone to the point that he has facial hair (even if he supposedly quit two years ago), I'm skeptical about this person's ability to conceive.

I guess we'll all find out in about three months.

UPDATE: Another article I found indicated he lost only one Fallopian tube, and Thomas insists that his body recovered back to its normal hormonal balance after ceasing testosterone. Like I said, we'll see.

If this is for real, I shudder.

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