‘Alien Nation’s’ Sweeps Week Eye-Opener : Television: A man gives birth as the series turns gender stereotypes on their heads.

We know that the baby is a girl. But is the mother a woman or a man?

It’s the February “sweeps” period and, as always, TV characters are being born, dying, getting married or wearing very skimpy outfits in an effort to punch up the ratings.

But while Fox Broadcasting’s “Alien Nation” will honor sweeps tradition by bringing forth a new baby Feb. 19, it will nuke the laws of nature as we know them by having the father give birth to the child.

Kenneth Johnson, executive producer of “Alien Nation,” says that the series, about the culture clash between a group of alien immigrants and their human counterparts in Los Angeles, 1995, is the ideal forum in which to “take all the female cliches of pregnancy and stand them on their head.”

Tonight at 9, George and Susan Francisco, natives of the planet Tecton and known here as Newcomers, will undergo one of a Newcomer pregnancy’s most touching moments. After four months of incubation inside the mother’s body, a pod is ejected and transferred to the father in a joyful ceremony. The father then carries the “haffecota” in his “pouch” for the duration of the pregnancy.

George, a police officer, invites his reluctant partner, Detective Matthew Sikes, to the pod ceremony.

“It’s about the size of a little nerf football, with a hard shell,” Johnson said. “This kind of magical, living umbilical cord finds its way to George. I wanted to create the moment when the parents were actually physically attached.”

In the episode airing next Monday, George will give birth.

Johnson said that the idea of sharing the pregnancy was inspired by sea horses; the male sea horse carries the fertilized eggs. “Alien Nation” already had hinted that aliens do things a little differently in an earlier episode, in which it shown that the Tectonian female requires not one, but two males in order to conceive a child.

“People expected it to be salacious, but it was a very moving, almost spiritual experience,” Johnson said.

Besides pointing out the biological differences between humans and aliens, these two new episodes--entitled “Partners” and “Real Men”--gave the writers a chance to blast male and female stereotypes.

This is particularly evident in “Real Men,” in which police officer George--as weepy and hyper-emotional as any man with a pod in his pouch--must deal with the derision of his colleagues, his partner’s embarrassment and a very weird baby shower before coming to terms with his own concept of masculinity.

The staffers of “Alien Nation” prepared actor Eric Pierpoint, who plays George, for his on-camera ordeal by throwing him a mock baby shower at half-time while they all watched the Super Bowl.

“This episode sort of asks the question, ‘What is a real man?’ ” Johnson said. “Sikes’ concept of masculinity is ‘Rambo.’ It takes George pretty much the whole episode of trying to force himself into our human concept of what macho-ness is all about to find out that, by doing so, he had denied his whole self by denying his feminine side.”

In later episodes, viewers will discover that alien babies nurse on something other than milk and that, instead of rocking, they prefer to be gently rotated on a turntable. “Alien Nation” will also explore the problems of finding adequate day care.

“Day care is a major problem,” Johnson said. “Especially alien day care.”