"Somewhere on this globe, every ten seconds, there is a woman giving birth to a child. She must be found and stopped"
About this Quote
The intent is less anti-woman than anti-sentimentality. Levenson is parodying the way public discourse turns life into numbers and numbers into righteousness. By setting up a global fact (“every ten seconds”) he invites the reader to adopt a god’s-eye view, then punctures that elevated posture with a punchline that’s petty, irritated, and ludicrously coercive. The subtext: our reflex to treat any statistic as an emergency can be manipulated; our appetite for “doing something” can slide into cruelty when divorced from actual context.
Historically, Levenson wrote in a mid-century American comic tradition that prized deadpan misdirection and cynicism about do-gooder language. Read now, the line gains extra bite amid contemporary anxieties about reproductive politics and population panic. It’s not a policy argument; it’s a satire of how easily “concern” becomes control - how quickly the rhetoric of saving people can be repurposed to police them.
Quote Details
| Topic | Dark Humor |
|---|---|
| Source | Later attribution: The Most Unusual Quiz Book in the World Volume 1 modern compilationID: CLhhyi9kfsAC
Evidence:
... Somewhere on this globe, every ten seconds, there is a woman giving birth to a child. She must be found and stopped." (Sam Levenson) ... (Samuel Goldwyn) "Last night I dreamed I ate a ten-pound marshmallow, and when I woke up the pillow ... |
| Cite |
Citation Formats
APA Style (7th ed.)
Levenson, Sam. (2026, February 19). Somewhere on this globe, every ten seconds, there is a woman giving birth to a child. She must be found and stopped. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/somewhere-on-this-globe-every-ten-seconds-there-168453/
Chicago Style
Levenson, Sam. "Somewhere on this globe, every ten seconds, there is a woman giving birth to a child. She must be found and stopped." FixQuotes. February 19, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/somewhere-on-this-globe-every-ten-seconds-there-168453/.
MLA Style (9th ed.)
"Somewhere on this globe, every ten seconds, there is a woman giving birth to a child. She must be found and stopped." FixQuotes, 19 Feb. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/somewhere-on-this-globe-every-ten-seconds-there-168453/. Accessed 6 Mar. 2026.
