Reality Imitates Fiction: Thomas Beatie And His Junior

Reality Imitates Fiction: Thomas Beatie And His Junior

Remember the 1994 Arnold Schwarzenegger & Danny DeVito starrer Junior which revolved around the world’s first human male pregnancy. In the film Alex Hesse(Arnold) and Larry Arbogast(Devito) are working on a new drug which will reduce the chances of a woman’s body rejecting an embryo and thus causing a miscarriage. When their research funding is withdrawn, and human experimentation is denied to them, they decide to test the drug by breifly impregnating Hesse. Hesse however becomes attached to “his” unborn baby and decides to go through with the entire pregnancy.

Cut to the present, and you have Mr. Thomas Beatie as the worlds first pregnant man. Mr Beatie, who was born a woman but is legally a man after undergoing partial sex change procedures ten years ago, fathered his child Susan Juliette with sperm from an anonymous donor. He was able to do so because he had kept his reproductive organs during the sex change procedure. Today his wife Nancy breastfeeds the baby girl, using hormones and a breast pump to stimulate lactation.

Mr Beatie thought of carrying the baby as his wife Nancy did not have the ability to conceive after a hysterectomy. The bearded Mr Beatie was born a girl and named Tracy Lagondino. She however got her sex changed and later as a man he married Nancy. To conceive, Mr Beatie stopped the bimonthly testosterone injections he was receiving as part of his sex change. The couple later on bought anonymous donor vials from a sperm bank and, struggling to find a doctor willing to help them, resorted to home insemination with a syringe bought from a vet that is typically used to feed birds. “I actually opted not to do anything to my reproductive organs because I wanted to have a child one day. I see pregnancy as a process and it doesn’t define who I am,” Mr Beatie told the TV talk-show host Oprah Winfrey in April. “I feel it’s not a male or female desire to have a child. It’s a human need. I’m a person and I have the right to have a biological child,” he said (Source).

Well, Mr Beatie and his wife have made in excess of $500,000 from the publicity that they have attracted and have decided to have more children in the future with Mr.Beatie as the carrier. Talk about reality imitating fiction, it definitely doesn’t get closer than this. Catch a video of the man himself below.