Parenting & Family Quote by Anthony Burgess

Burgess drops a punchline that lands like a slap: a clinical euphemism colliding with blunt biological consequence. "Artificial respiration" is the kind of phrase that sanitizes the messy, intimate, and often coercive realities of sex. It belongs to the hospital, the instruction manual, the polite lie. Then the second clause detonates it. Pregnancy is proof, the body as receipt, and the speaker's belated "now I find" frames the whole thing as a grim update from lived experience.

The intent is less to shock for shock's sake than to expose how language can be weaponized. Someone "said" it was something else: a man narrating an act into innocence, wrapping it in pseudo-medical authority. Burgess, forever alert to the politics of diction, lets the rhetorical scam do most of the work. The line mimics the structure of a joke (setup, turn, revelation), but the laughter curdles because the stakes are asymmetrical: one party gets plausible deniability, the other gets a life-changing outcome.

Subtext: consent blurred by verbal trickery; a woman's agency overridden by a man's story about what just happened; the chilling ease with which power hides behind technical language. Contextually, it fits Burgess's recurring obsession with moral chaos in modernity and with how institutional vocabularies (medicine, law, bureaucracy) can launder violence into something that sounds almost helpful. The sentence is short, ruthless, and diagnostic: not of a pregnancy, but of a culture that believes whatever sounds official.