Is society ready for this pregnant husband?
Posted on April 1, 2008
Filed Under Gay/Lesbian | Comments Off on Is society ready for this pregnant husband?
Thomas Beatie, of Bend, Oregon, who was a woman prior to his operation, has published a first-person account of his pregnancy in the April 8 issue of gay publication The Advocate.
“Wanting to have a biological child is neither a male nor female desire, but a human desire,” he writes.
Beatie was formerly a lesbian who underwent a sex change operation in order to marry the love of his life, Nancy Roberts. At the time they were living in Hawaii, which bans same sex marriages.
They moved to Oregon and, after 10 years together, they longed to start a family. But Nancy had undergone a hysterectomy years earlier due to medical problems.
Beatie’s sex change surgery involved chest reconstruction and testosterone therapy, but he chose to keep his female reproductive organs.
Though he was legally a man, when the couple decided to have children he stopped taking male hormones and began getting his period again.
Beatie was then easily able to conceive a child using donor sperm, without fertility treatments. After losing a life-threatening initial pregnancy, with triplets, he and wife Nancy are expecting a healthy baby girl in July, he wrote in The Advocate, which shows a shirtless photo of him with a baby bump at 22 weeks.
He plans to continue living as a man as his pregnancy becomes increasingly obvious to the world. “Despite the fact that my belly is growing with a new life inside me, I am stable and confident being the man that I am,” he wrote in The Advocate.
Despite discrimination from doctors, some of whom refused to provide medical care for the pregnant man, as well as questions about how the baby might be affected by having a father for a mother, Beatie seems to think whatever obstacles his family might face are well worth it.
“I will be my daughter’s father and Nancy will be her mother,” he said. “We will be a family.
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