The rapper announced at a concert Sunday night that his girlfriend is pregnant. He told the crowd of more than 5,000 at Revel Resort's Ovation Hall in song form: "Now you having my baby."

The crowd roared.

Most of the Kardashian clan tweeted about the news, including Kim's sisters and mother. Kourtney Kardashian wrote: "Another angel to welcome to our family. Overwhelmed with excitement!"

West also told concertgoers to congratulate his "baby mom" and that this was the "most amazing thing."

Representatives for West and Kardashian didn't immediately respond to emails about the pregnancy.

The rapper and reality TV star went public in March. Kardashian, 32, is about 12 weeks along, according to TMZ.

Kardashian married NBA player Kris Humphries in August 2011 and their divorce is not finalized.

West's Sunday night show was his third consecutive performance at Revel. He took the stage for nearly two hours, performing hits like "Good Life," "Jesus Walks" and "Clique" in an all-white ensemble with two band mates.

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Such testing tends to happen at the discretion of the hospital. "Private hospitals in rich neighborhoods rarely test new mothers for drugs, whereas hospitals serving primarily low-income moms make those tests routine and sometimes mandatory," concludes The News' Oren Yaniv. This is true more broadly. According to the National Advocates for Pregnant Women, "More than eighteen states now address the issue of pregnant women’s drug use in their civil child neglect laws, and a growing number of these states make it possible to remove a child based on nothing more than a single positive drug test."

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It started with Piqué posting the image on his WhoSay account, with the caption "His first pic! #excited #cute." I'm not the dad, but it looks ... like an ultrasound. Shakira promptly retweeted it, and before the day was out you couldn't go online without seeing the black-and-white profile of Shakira's fetus and the random womb blobs surrounding him, accompanied by a headline about the "first ultrasound photo." That has a portentous ring of more to come, doesn't it? Parents, is this really going to be a thing with you from now on?

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Douthat calls for an end to our modern, feminist ways, which he calls "decadent." But I would like to offer a better, more humane solution to the problem of a declining future workforce: Instead of simply flooding the market with babies to buoy the economy, why not invest—with public funds, as a community—in the ones we have to get the same results?

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Cameron's tweet is reflective of a broader narrative in which this royal pregnancy is couched. "They will make wonderful parents," without mentioning ascension to the throne. It's a treatment now common in discourse about the royals: to talk of them like beloved characters in a soap opera and judge them simply as husbands, wives, newlyweds, brothers, lovers and parents. Let's talk about baby bumps, breast milk or bottles. Let's not mention that nagging anachronism -- we're not just talking about young, expectant parents -- we're  talking about royalty.

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I held my breath, and he plunged the needle in my belly, ringed with the bruises that marked his love for me. For an upcoming fertility treatment, I had to inject myself that evening, during the hours I attended a book reading in Los Feliz. By the time my husband and I left the reception -- where the two of us going into the house’s sole bathroom would have perplexed guests – it was too late to wait until we returned home.

We’d been trying to get pregnant for more than a year and a half, starting when I was 33 years old. The cause of our infertility remained a mystery, and I couldn’t help but feel my body had failed me, the athletic and dependable body that had carried me through a triathlon, a marathon, hikes in the Sierras and reporting trips in Asia and Latin America.

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Almost six months ago I received a piece of troubling news that I have been unable to come to terms with: I am 100 percent sterile, due to what my doctor calls a "random genetic abnormality."

This revelation has sent me spiraling downward into a dark mood that I have been unable to lift since. I have always envisioned my future with a family of my own taking center stage, and now that vision has been shattered. It doesn't help that each of the three women I cared about began to shun me shortly after I told them, and as of this writing, still are. It's as if infertility has thrown some invisible barrier up between myself and the world of dating, leaving me to find solace in large amounts of alcohol and far too many pints of ice cream.

Upon receiving the news that my best friend's wife was going to have a baby, I congratulated him, only to feel hatred and jealousy bubble up inside me. He'll soon have a son or daughter that is his own flesh and blood, a precious blessing I will never receive, and as much as I'm trying not to, I hate him for it. I'll never hear the words "He looks just like his dad!" or "She has her father's eyes!" like he will, and I fear constantly that the growing animosity I feel toward him might tear our decade-long friendship to tatters.

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I spent hours studying my baby’s development on a website called Babycenter.com, which explained that he resembled a sesame seed at week 5, a kumquat at week 10 and a bell pepper at week 18. Perhaps subconsciously inspired by their comparisons, I consumed so many raw vegetables and legumes that I walked around most days enveloped by a noxious cloud of gas.

I attended prenatal yoga, where the instructor encouraged us to gripe for a full half-hour about our blown-out backs and throbbing feet and constipation, and where the other women all pretended not to notice that I was the stinkiest among them, though they all sat at a respectable distance, having realized that downward dog tended to stir things up down there.

The power pregnancy exerted over my body and my brain freaked me out.

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I’ve made jokes about JO rooms before. Let met tell you: If you ever find yourself in a real JO room, you won’t be laughing.

I don’t mean because you’re standing on the precipice of learning you are unable to have children. Who cares about that? Even if you can have a kid, that kid is going to have a terrible life and die just like you. No, it’s the JO room itself that gets to you.

My appointment was at 8:30 a.m. I’m guessing this is a little before the doctor starts seeing patients, because there was only one receptionist and I was the only patient in the waiting room. That makes sense. You don’t want your JO guys looking at your single-ovary moms. No one can make a baby with that going on. No one would want to.

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That’s exactly what happened to a young mother, identified pseudonymously as “Rebecca,” who wanted to stay on methadone and keep her baby, as reported in an excellent account on the Daily Beast. Even worse, she is not alone.

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I feel like my life is at a crossroads, and either direction I take is going to have major consequences.  I am 33 years old, almost 34, and I just ended my umpteenth relationship. There was nothing wrong with the guy -- we just were taking different paths.  I consider myself to be ultra-capable.  Right now, I am working for a political organization while teaching a college course and finishing my dissertation and taking on freelance work on the side.  I volunteer, I exercise, I have family and friends I love.  The only thing I have felt is missing in my life is a child.  

Like any woman at my age and in my situation, I always figured I would meet a man, fall in love, and have children. But, as I went out and lived my life, living overseas for a while, working in public life, extending my studies as far as they could go, it just never seemed to happen. I've dated (and dated and dated) since college, and none of them really "'clicked" with me.  I have been accused of having a "strong personality" and I like to lead -- many friends think I will probably hold office one day -- and the men I tend to associate with are just uncomfortable with that in a partner.  But I'm not writing for relationship advice.  I think I will likely meet someone someday, or maybe not, but I can't force it.

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The theory was that by inserting the wire through the cervix, moving it around a bit and then removing it, an infection would result and the pregnancy would be aborted. It worked. It was March 1967.

Afterward, after I watched the 'doctor' wash his hands with one of those little soaps wrapped in white paper, after he tilted the bedside lamp just so and after he said, "That should do it," I got dressed, left the motel with the flashing vacancy sign, made my way to the bus station in downtown Detroit, and rode in the dark in the eerie silence of a mostly empty Greyhound all the way back to Mt. Pleasant, the tiny Michigan town where I was a freshman in college. Curled up next to the window under my black pea coat, I wondered how long it would take, whether it would be on the bus or later. I worried that something a lot worse than being pregnant would happen to me because of what happened in the motel room, that I'd get sick or bleed to death. I wondered if I would ever feel right about what I had done and if there had been choices that I hadn't considered. I remember feeling like a mouse that had found the tiniest hole for escape while a giant tomcat loomed. I was distraught, empty and alone on that bus. Back in my dorm room, Jane, my roommate, held both of my hands in hers and said, "It will be OK. You'll see. You'll have lots of children when the time is right." It was a gesture of kindness and compassion that even now brings tears to my eyes.

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I met Josh on the previous Passover while sitting around a friend’s seder table. Josh arrived late in, as I know now, classic Josh fashion. He was handsome and kind, and he smiled at me from across the table. I liked his family immediately — his beautiful sisters, his little brother who spoke softly and with difficulty, and his nonchalant parents who seemed to smile approvingly at our flirtation across the table. Did I notice then that he was young and somewhat small? I mostly remember his teeth, crooked and pointing in all directions. I found them so beautiful that I had to stop myself from staring at them when he spoke.

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A year earlier, I had tumbled into a mid-life crisis. I had one child who was nearly three, and my husband and I were planning for a second. This had always been our intention, and I approached this second foray without much anxiety. But when my younger sister called to tell me she and her boyfriend were going to London, something inside my head was knocked loose. “Damn,” I thought. “I’m going to be a MOMMY.”

Yes, I know what you’re thinking: You’ve been a mommy for three years. Get over it.

But it wasn’t the prospect of becoming a parent that freaked me out. I loved my little boy and wanted to add another goofball to the family. What threw me into a tizzy was the prospect of being a mommy and all the cultural baggage that came along with it. With one child, you could be that interesting woman with the cute kid who still retained a modicum of cool. But the second child would define you. This is faulty logic, I know, but I believed it nonetheless: A mommy is invisible. A mommy has bad jeans and a minivan. Twenty-five-year-old boys would never check me out. I would never take off to London on a whim.

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Attempts to fix my cycle didn’t work. Over time, my bleeding worsened. That’s when my fertility specialist recommended in vitro fertilization. IVF, he said, would allow him to “toy around” with my hormones. As he explained how many types of drugs he planned to inject in my body, I nodded politely while screaming no way inside my head. I was skeptical of high-tech baby-making measures. All that medication didn’t appeal, for one thing. Neither did the odds: I’d seen friends go through multiple failed rounds of IVF (chances are about one in three). From what I could tell, the stress of IVF wreaked havoc on relationships. Couples pillaged their savings and retirement accounts (the procedure is $15,000 a pop). I figured if traditional medicine wasn’t for me, perhaps I could cure my infertility a more traditional way, by changing what I ate and how I lived.

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Look, I'm human, and as such, I've always found babies cute -- but, suddenly, right around my 28th birthday earlier this year, crossing paths with them caused me to grab the arm of my acquaintance as though I'd seen a celebrity. Reactions formerly reserved for baby animals began to apply to human infants. Noticing this shift, a friend who hadn't seen me for a while remarked, "Since when are you baby crazy?" The real question is: Since when did I become such a cliché?

It's not that I'm ready to reproduce -- good God, no -- but I do want to have a baby eventually, though the possibility seems many years off. Will I be ready -- emotionally, professionally, financially, romantically -- before my fertility nose-dives? This longing feels physically acute -- a twitching in my ovaries, an itching in my arms to cradle. In the past, I'd always written off the cliché of the woman in her late 20s or early 30s with a "ticking biological clock" as a sexist trope. Now I find myself reconsidering and wondering how real it is, and why it is.

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And they do: People ask all kinds of probing questions -- from the sometimes innocent, “Do twins run in your family?" to the blatant, “Was it natural?”

And it wasn’t. Our twins were the result of ovulation stimulation drugs and an IUI (intrauterine insemination).

But the question I started asking myself was: Why should I care if people suspected or knew I needed “help” getting pregnant? Especially in an age in which so many women seek medical intervention when they have trouble conceiving. And especially at a time when twins are becoming the new normal: Recently, the CDC reported that 1 in every 30 babies born in the United States today is a twin.

Part of my self-consciousness came from the fact that infertility treatments are an intimate affair. Your private parts are prodded, your internal organs scrutinized, and your bodily fluids drawn. Nobody looks at one little baby and thinks, “Gee, wonder how that thing got made?” whereas multiples beg the question: How exactly did that happen? I wasn’t crazy about my reproductive process being speculated upon or, more to the point, given any thought at all.

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I used to be a very ambitious person. As a child, I dreamed of being famous (an actress) and felt sure that I was destined for a golden life of magnificent fortune. I pursued this goal  with some tenacity (and varying degrees of success) through my 20s and early 30s. Now I find myself (at 35) questioning the nature and value of the "entertainment industry" and struggling to find the motivation or inspiration to continue in this field.

I lead a lucky life in many ways. I have fallen into the voice-over industry, which is highly lucrative and affords me the great luxury of time. I have a wonderful (new) marriage and our first baby is on the way. I live in Sydney, Australia, to many considered the land of milk and honey. The sun shines, a sparkling ocean is on my doorstep and my days are filled with many moments of ease and relaxation.

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"Sex Cells," a new book by Rene Almeling, an assistant professor of sociology at Yale University, pulls back the curtain on the egg and sperm market. She looks at the ways our cultural assumptions about gender roles influence not only the egg and sperm donation industry but also the people within it. As it turns out, egg and sperm donors have remarkably different experiences of the process. "Sex Cells" explains how this unique industry shapes the way we think about gender and parenthood.

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"Wait," she says. "Maybe you should read the directions again."

I float back into the bathroom, smiling like a drunk puppy. "Two lines -- pregnant," I read.

We are ready. I am 30, she is 31. This condo we bought last year is a two-bedroom, McCarren Park is down the block, and the schools in Greenpoint are good. We just spent a decade graduating and clerking and teaching and secretarying and marrying and back-to-schooling and climbing and moving and traveling and fighting and growing and still liking our lives (mostly), and this is the right time for a family.

But still: Holy crap.

This could take a year of trying, we heard. You can only get pregnant a few days a month anyway, we heard. But there they are, two pink lines.

The whole testing idea is a whim; there is no waiting through days of lateness, no tense and excited buildup. It's a rare night off for me. She arrives home at 7 and mentions she's one day late. I say, "Let's get a test, then."

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