Friday, April 13, 2012

Is 16,999 Clerical Errors News?

The headline in this Washington Post story read:

Why Britain has 17,000 pregnant men


and it went on to point out that, during the years 2009 and 2010, 17000 British men requested services such as "obstetric exams and midwife services."

Alas, they attributed it to data entry errors, where a code for one service was mis-entered as a code for a different one.

But my favourite quote comes from the authors of the original article (a letter, actually, to a British journal):

“We suspect that the numbers may, at least partly, reflect data errors.”

"At least partly?"  So 17,000 pregnant British men is newsworthy, but how about if there were 16,999 data errors and one pregnant British man?

Which brings me to my poll.

For my born-male readers (that's most of you)... if you could, would you want to give birth to a baby?  This assumes there's a way for you to pop out a little squalling infant.  Would you, even if that meant you had to be cut open so they could extract Junior?

I'm going to make an assumption here: if you want to give birth, you'll want to nurse the puppy too, so there's no "I'd love to have a baby but no way is she gonna latch on to my breast!" option.

I'm really curious to see what you write for this one!  Give it some thought.



2 comments:

  1. Beijing doctor Chen Huanran, one of China's most prominent sex change surgeons, says he has developed the technology to impregnate a man, and now he wants to use his technique to help his transsexual patuents have children of their own. The procedure involves injection of female hormones and implantation of the embryo in the abdomen. It would be painful. Similar to an ectopic pregnancy. If they can come up with an artificial uterus or implant a real one in a transsexual that would be better.

    As far as breast feeding goes, I would be up for that. When my daughter was an infant, I was bottle feeding her on one occasion. I took off my shirt, placed her on my chest, and tried to get her to to latch onto one of my nipples. It did not work. I am not sure whether it was because I didnt smell like her mother, my nipples were too small to see, or that I could not express any milk.

    It would have been an interesting experiment if I had put some breast milk there and worn my wife's shirt beforehand.

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  2. I saw my daughter being born. a wonderful experience to be sure, but one thing I did notice that there seemed to be quite a lot of pain involved, there is no way I would volunteer for that sort of pain, no I would be happy if children arrived miraculously at the age of 9 or 10

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