Interrupts sex change treatment to have child

Another thrilling chapter in the annals
of artificial reproductive technology is being written in Spain. A
25-year-old transsexual woman who has had her breasts removed and was
taking hormone therapy to become a man is pregnant. “Man to become
first in world to give birth to twins” was the headline in the
London Telegraph. The Spanish media has been full of images of
a lean, balding, bespectacled man with a three-day growth rubbing his
baby bump.

Rubén Noé Coronado Jiménez will not
be the first transsexual to bear a child – firstest with the
mostest was an American, Thomas Beatie — but he (or she) will be the
first to be the mother/father of twins.

Coronado Jiménez decided to interrupt
her transformation because she realised that her 43-year-old partner,
Esperanza Ruiz, was too old to become pregnant again. (She already
has two children, aged 13 and 16.) "I have a right to have a
baby," she told the media. "We are going to be a father, a
mother and two children. I don’t see the problem." Coronado
Jiménez plans to have a sex-change operation in September, after the
baby arrives.

Even Spanish gender specialists shook their heads over this case.
Dr Josep-Luis Ballescà, of the Clinical Hospital of Barcelona,
called the pregnancy "technically feasible but not necessarily
ethically acceptable". He added: "It is a contradiction. I
do not favour it."

However, Roger Crisp, of the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical
Ethics, found flaws in this reasoning. The notion that something must
be either natural or unnatural assumes that things have goals or
purposes. If we believed that, we would have to believe in God and in
his scriptures and these are ambiguous and contradictory. Why
shouldn’t men do some heavy lifting in the reproductive department,
he asks. ~ Diario
de Mallorca, Mar 24; Guardian,
Mar 30; Practical
Ethics, Apr 2

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Michael Cook

Michael Cook edits BioEdge, a bioethics newsletter, and MercatorNet, an on-line magazine whose focus is human dignity. He writes from Sydney, Australia.

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