Why Only Nigerian Women Are “Pregnant For” Men – Farooq Kperogi

By Farooq Kperogi

It’s only in Nigerian English (and perhaps in Ghanaian English since both varieties share a lot in common) that woman say they’re “pregnant for” a man. “Pregnant for” is probably a translation of socio-cultural thoughts from some Nigerian languages, but the Nigerian languages I am familiar with have no equivalent expression for that phrase, so I’m really not sure where that came from.

Well, native English speakers usually say they’re “pregnant by a man” to show that the “man” is responsible for the pregnancy. Americans (both wife & husband) now say “we are pregnant!”🤣It seems to me that the tendency for Nigerian women to say they’re “pregnant for” a man is a reflection of their internalization of & capitulation to the dominant patriarchal arrogance in the Nigerian society.

The phrase gives ownership of the child to the man— to the exclusion of the woman who carries the baby in her stomach for nine months. Since a child is biologically half of both its father & its mother, it is illogical to say you’re pregnant “for” a man. In fact, only the mother can logically claim ownership of a pregnancy.

As my Anglo-Cameroonian friend @SamiraEdi once said, “A woman cannot be pregnant for somebody else except for herself!” Being responsible for pregnancy doesn’t give a man exclusive ownership of it; at best it gives him part ownership.

Maybe a surrogate mother can correctly say she’s “pregnant for” another woman– or for a couple–since the woman or the couple takes ownership of the child after delivery. Saying you’re “pregnant for” a man is especially problematic because while a child’s maternal connection is often never in contention (except in rare cases of child swapping in hospitals), its paternity is never always indisputably self-evident except thru DNA testing or noticeably striking resemblance.

That’s why Americans humorously say, “Mommy’s baby, daddy’s maybe.”