Pregnancy: Man’s Final Frontier

This Father’s Day, as we dads prepare to open our gifts of after-shave and barbecue aprons, it’s time to face up to the only challenge left for a real man in the 1990s. Forget taming the West, conquering space or climbing Mt. Everest in shorts and sandals. For men, pregnancy is the last frontier, and it’s just a question now of who’s going first.

How do I know? Television. Already this year two popular prime-time programs have dealt with the issue. On “Alien Nation,” the otherworldly George Francisco, uncomfortably swollen and feeling sorry for himself, wails to his detective partner: “I shouldn’t expect you to sympathize. You don’t have to get up five times a night to urinate. You have no understanding of what I’m going through.”

On “The Cosby Show,” several men find themselves dreaming of being pregnant. But instead of having a baby, they give birth to one of their fondest desires. Dr. Heathcliff Huxtable (Bill Cosby) has a submarine sandwich.

Sure, the notion of a man with a baby in his belly is played for laughs. But television is our most potent purveyor of new ideas; there’s some serious groundbreaking going on here, too. “Alien Nation” executive producer Kenneth Johnson has confessed to having a bad case of “uterine envy” and he says he would leap at the chance to give birth. The “Alien Nation” pregnancy episode, he says, was designed to confront stereotypes of men’s and women’s roles, and break them down. And where TV leads, real life usually follows.

But before we get around to nominating candidates, let’s deal with a couple of pregnant questions looming over this androgynous new world: how and why.

Relatively speaking, how is the easy part. According to doctors who have theorized about men as mothers, a fertilized egg could be surgically implanted in the lining of a man’s abdominal cavity, and with infusions of female hormones, the embryo would form its own placenta and grow. The baby would be delivered by Cesarean section.

But why? Any man who has accompanied a partner through pregnancy and childbirth knows what hard, painful, messy work we’re talking about here. And besides, women do it now, naturally and well. So what’s the point of overriding Mother Nature? To be first? For adventure? Because, as the climber said of the mountain, it’s there?

Or is it there? Abdominal pregnancies do happen sometimes in women, and they are dangerous, often presenting life-threatening complications. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t men willing to take the risks. In fact, the risks guarantee a ready supply of willing men.

Now, who’s first?

Well, I’d volunteer myself, but I’ve done some pioneering already as a househusband, and in fact I’m still at home. Weekdays I work as a writer until the children, Annie, now 12, and Joey, 8, come from school, and after that I’m pretty busy running a shuttle service to baseball and karate practice and figuring out what to microwave for dinner. Honestly, I don’t have the time for a baby right now. Besides, at 47 I’m a little past childbearing age, and a couple of weeks ago I pulled a muscle in my back playing basketball at the Y and it’s still bothering me.

No, the candidate we’re looking for is a much younger person. In fact, since the medical technology is not quite worked out, and since, to my knowledge, other opinion molders such as “thirtysomething” and “Murphy Brown” have yet to weigh in on male pregnancy, we are probably a few years away from sending a man into deep labor. Maybe even 20 years away.

Assuming that a fellow about 30 years old would be the right age to go first, the person we’re looking for is now a lad of about 10, or even 8 or 9, from a family headed by parents unafraid to break with tradition, willing to start preparing now to give their male child a place in history that will make Neil Armstrong and Lewis and Clark seem like timid stay-at-homes.

Who? My son Joey?

Well, no, Joey will be committed to a career in the National Basketball Assn. by then. Or come to think of it, he might even be off exploring the remote reaches of the Antarctic, in a climate totally unsuited to the raising of children.

In fact, let’s forget the whole thing. The truth is, I just can’t imagine how pregnancy for men would work, or whoever thought it was a good idea in the first place. Because I sure don’t have the stomach for it. And neither, I hope, does my son.