Male Pregnancy - Frequently Asked Questions

When is Mr. Lee's due date? A due date has not yet been set for Mr. Lee's Cesarian section operation. Please see Mr. Lee's Online Journal for the latest updates.

Will the birth be broadcasted live over the Internet? Mr. Lee has become increasingly uneasy with the enormous media attention his pregnancy is attracting. As a result, he is considering giving birth in private. For the same reason, detailed information following his pregnancy may be limited to the press as well as this web site.

Will Mr. Lee breast-feed the child? Though he may be biologically able to do so, Mr. Lee has indicated that he will most likely bottle-feed his child.

Is this a hoax or some perverse form of art-making? Some web sites have claimed to "debunk the male pregnancy hoax," but they're mistaken. This is not a hoax like Orson Welles' War of the Worlds broadcast. It's true that many of the people involved in this project (including Mr. Lee) are indeed artists — and Virgil Wong has created an art installation of Male Pregnancy for exhibit at the PaperVeins Museum of Art — but yes, Mr. Lee is really pregnant.

Where do I go for more information about male pregnancy? A list of book references will be online shortly as well as additional documentation of Mr. Lee's pregnancy.

What were the exact hormones administered to the patient? The following hormones were given to Mr. Lee: lutenizing hormone, folicle stimulating hormone, estrogen, testosterone, progesterone, thyroid, and gamma fluro buterarone. Please see Figure 1 and Figure 2 for more details.

How does the fetus obtain nutrients from Mr. Lee's body? The umbilical cord and placenta are implanted into Mr. Lee's body. The metabolic exchanges between the fetus and patient, between mucosal with chorionic tissues, are almost analagous to female pregnancies. For more information, please see our Science of Male Pregnancy web page.

How have the hazards of massive hemorrhaging during similar ectopic pregnancies been addressed? The chorionic tissues of the patient were genetically altered to adopt biochemical properties similar to uterine wall tissue. The modified cells possess similar characteristics as allantoic cells and mimick their general properties during female pregnancies.

Was this an IRB approved study? The IRB (Institutional Review Board) of RYT Hospital - Dwayne Medical Center fully approved the male pregnancy research studies and clinical trials. Drs. Elizabeth Preatner and Simone Lowell report to the IRB periodically with any changes to the parameters of their study and updates the Board periodically.

How are the EKG, ultrasound, and other vitals generated as Flash elements or animated GIF's? An online medical telemetry system records Mr. Lee's vitals and stores all the information within an Oracle database. A graphic representation of selected data elements is generated in real time as .SWF or .GIF files using WebObjects as the application gateway.

Why does the live image appear to repeat occasionally? A cameraman follows Mr. Lee 24 hours a day (he is also accompanied by a small group team of physicians, researchers, and nurses). Most of this footage is being shot for the film documentary, but selected snapshots are published to the RYT Hospital web server. A "random-selector" Javascript pulls a single JPEG from this batch of images and displays it on the malepregnancy.com home page. Occasionally, our live camera feed server caches the image, and you will see the same image more than once.

What back-end technologies are you using for this web site? MalePregnancy.com's public Oracle database is fully-integrated with RYT Hospital's internal ambulatory care information system (which runs off an application called Epic). WebObjects is our application gateway for most of the functionalities that you see, but the pages are dynamically generated as static .HTML and .SHTML files to facilitate the indexing of these pages by search engines.