"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
A joke that lands like a small moral felony: it takes the most sacred-seeming human act and treats it like a public nuisance requiring enforcement. Levenson’s line is built on a bait-and-switch. The first sentence mimics the cadence of humanitarian alarmism - the sort of statistical throat-clearing used to summon empathy, donations, policy. Then it swerves into authoritarian absurdity: not “help her,” not “protect her,” but “found and stopped,” as if childbirth were a crime spree.
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.
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 |
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