Fanlore:Featured Article Archives/2019: Week 30
Mpreg (short for male pregnancy) is a plot device in which men become pregnant. It occurs with some frequency in slash and very rarely in het.
In these fanworks, the man who gets pregnant is usually human and cisgender. There is often no explanation for the phenomenon, although it may be explained by magic, medical experimentation, or simply the existence of an alternate universe where men are commonly pregnant. In some dystopian mpreg AUs, the role or status of males able to get pregnant may differ markedly from that of impregnating males.
While there are a few mpreg fanworks from the 1980s, it is a genre that was not generally addressed by fans until the mid-to late-1990s.
Nowadays in fandom, Mpreg is most commonly found in fanworks written in the A/B/O universe, where male Omegas have the ability to become pregnant. "Mpreg" as a trope in isolation is increasingly rare in fanworks thanks to the popularity of A/B/O, but only because it tends to appear as part of that larger universe instead.