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A male friend, married to a lovely women, comes up to me beaming and says, "We're pregnant!"

"Wow!" I reply, with inappropriate sarcasm. "When I was a young man, only women could get pregnant."

I've heard this phrase—"We're pregnant"—too much recently, but it's time to move beyond sarcasm. The intent is as understandable as the execution is absurd. It arises out of the noble desire of men (and future fathers) to participate fully in the childrearing. And I understand that for many men, it simply means, "My wife and I are expecting a baby."

But the first dictionary meaning of pregnant remains, "Carrying developing offspring within the body." Whenever a word is misused, it means the speaker is unaware of the word's meaning, or that the cultural meaning of a word is shifting, or that some ideology is demanding obeisance. Probably all three are in play, but it's the last reality that we should pay attention to. It is not an accident that this phrase, "We're pregnant," has arisen in a culture that in many quarters is ponderously egalitarian and tries to deny the fundamental differences of men and women.

This phrase is most unfortunate after conception because it is an inadvertent co-opting of women by men—men using language to suggest that they share equally in the burdens and joys of pregnancy. Instead, pregnancy is one time women should flaunt their womanhood, and one time men should acknowledge the superiority of women. Men may be able to run the mile in less than four minutes and open stuck pickle jars with a twist of the wrist, but for all our physical prowess, we cannot carry new life within us and bring it into the world. To suggest that we do is a slap in the face of women.

It is also a slap in the face of our Creator, who made us male and female. We were not created with interchangable parts or traits, nor is it our purpose to duplicate or replace one another.

That's not a happy thought to many, because egalitarian culture resents differences. We believe (wrongly) that differences by their very nature are unequal. History would seem to support this assumption. The sad history of most cultures has assumed that male traits (authority and leadership) are superior to female traits (meekness and service). But that is more a product of human pride than of the created order. In the end, we have no objective standard by which to judge the intrinsic value of differing gifts and abilities.

For the Christian, any attempt to exalt male traits is utter nonsense. If one must traffic in in notions of superiority, then we'd have to grant superiority to women. For the teaching of Scripture and the example of Jesus make clear that meekness and service are the traits to glory in. But the very paradox of that sentence suggests the fruitlessness of such an approach.

Though social scientists try to deny the "superiority" of humility as well as differences in gender, they keep on bumping into hard facts. Professor W. Bradford Wilcox of the University of Virginia summarized some such findings a couple of years ago in an article in Touchstone, "Reconciling Differences: What Social Sciences Show About the Complementarity of the Sexes and Parenting."

He says that studies show what common sense could have predicted. Mothers have a distinctive advantage over fathers in at least three areas.

1. Breastfeeding. Along with pregnancy, this is another biological difference that can hardly be gainsaid. Breast milk offers infants sugars, nutrients, and antibodies that can't be recreated in infant formula. It also protects infants from at least eleven serious maladies, from ear infections to sudden infant death syndrome.
   
   

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July (Web-only) 2007, Vol. 51