Why do some men experience pregnancy symptoms such as vomiting and nausea when their wives are pregnant?
Katherine E. Wynne-Edwards is a professor of biology at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, who studies hormonal changes in expectant fathers and hormone-behavior interactions in other animal models. She offers the following explanation: When pregnancy symptoms such as nausea, weight gain, mood swings and bloating occur in men, the condition is called couvade, or sympathetic pregnancy. Depending on the human culture, couvade can also encompass ritualized behavior by the father during the labor and delivery of his child. Couvade has a long anecdotal history and is named from the French verb couver, which translates as to hatch or “to brood.” The phenomenon has received attention from biologists only quite recently, however. Estimates of the frequency of couvade are hard to obtain because of the low rate of reporting symptoms. For example, a research team led by Anne Storey of Memorial University in Newfoundland found that when wives were asked about their husband’s experiences a hi
