I have an interesting problem. I tutored today, and the girl read about how mammals, including humans, give milk to feed their babies. She can hardly believe it's so. She and her siblings were bottle-fed. She had never heard of such a thing. I told her I breast-fed my daughter, and we discussed it as well as her reading the stuff I brought. She completely accepted the fact that animals breast-feed and produce milk, but that humans do it, too, seemed to overwhelm her imagination.
Anyway, somehow, she mentioned that men could give birth, too, and I told her that was impossible, since women have things inside them to accommodate a baby that men don't have. She disagreed. She said she had Googled it and read about a man having a baby. She wanted me to look it up and verify it. I did, and there have been a number of men who have had babies, but the first, with lots of pictures, was a man who was born a woman and had gone
through a sex-change operation, removing his breasts and getting hormones, but never having a hysterectomy. So this man has had 3 kids! I don't think there has been a man who was born male who has ever given birth, though one site I read said it would be possible but very dangerous. Some women have abdominal pregnancies, where the fertilized egg doesn't go up into the uterus. I didn't read if any of these pregnancies resulted in a live birth, though. They were mainly discussing if a man could carry a fetus.
OK, the problem is, I have to explain to this 8-year-old girl how those men who gave birth weren't born men, and how they had the female equipment to do it. This will get into the discussion of sex-change operations, and I wonder if she's ready for such information.
I hate to just leave it as, "Yes, some special men can have babies, but most men can't." That seems like such a cop-out. And she's sure to ask what's special about those men who can do it vs. the ones that can't. Whew!
What would you do?
