Thaindian News

Washington, March 25 (ANI): Thomas Beatie, who became the first man to have a baby, is planning to have a fourth child despite being forced to file for bankruptcy and live on food stamps.

Beatie shocked the world in June 2008 to become the first man to give birth. That same year, the family’s annual self-employment income dropped drastically from over 300,000 dollars to negative 16,000 dollars in 2010.

A year after Beatie gave birth to his third child, he and his wife, Nancy, filed Chapter 11 when the stock market crash wiped out their savings and their T-shirt printing business took a drastic hit — leading to their home in Bend, Oregon to be repossessed in 2010.

“We couldn’t open the shop for several months because journalists and photographers kept turning up,” RadarOnline.com quoted Beatie as saying.

“We tried to keep up with regular orders, but we lost a lot of customers because of prejudice, and then the economy took a huge downturn.”

Since then, they moved into their holiday home in Phoenix, Arizona and are now struggling to maintain the mortgage payments, with 916 dollars in monthly food stamps and cash assistance, according to their bankruptcy filing filed in February - 400 dollars of which is spent on diapers alone.

To make their financial woes even worse, with assets totaling nearly 1 million dollars, the Beaties are over 3 million dollars in debt, as listed in their bankruptcy documents, which includes over 330,000 dollars for credit cards and over 14,000 dollars in medical expenses.

They couple claims only to have 150 dollars in their bank accounts.

Their current average monthly income since August 2010 is just over 3,500 dollars.

The couple are parents to Susan, 2, Austin, 20 months, and Jensen, seven months, and even amidst dire financial setbacks, they are already planning to expand their family within the year.

Beatie said he would like to have a final child before starting to take his testosterone again and working out to get back in “good manly shape.”

“I am only able to get pregnant four days out of the year,” he said.

“We’d need to try to conceive sooner rather than later.

“We are staying positive and we’re determined to make this a good family home. We’re both strong people and we’ve been through worse things in our lives. People might think this will have affected us and brought us down, but we refuse to let things beat us, and we don’t want anyone’s sympathy,” Beatie added. (ANI)