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