Michelle Obama joked on her podcast that men would get trophies for giving birth if they could get pregnant, drawing online backlash from critics who called the bit ignorant and strange.
Former first lady Michelle Obama sat down with actress Sharon Stone on the Wednesday, September 30th episode of IMO with Michelle Obama and Craig Robinson and turned a talk about pregnancy into a riff on how men would supposedly handle childbirth.
Obama said that if men could get pregnant, “there would be trophies given.” She floated “the birth-Olympics,” pictured men filming themselves in labor and “honoring their pain,” and imagined guys congratulating each other with lines like “Well done, dude! Bob, you did that without an epidural!”
SheFinds reported the exchange and the wave of disapproval that followed across social media, including Instagram.
Stone used the same conversation to discuss her own teenage pregnancy and abortion, plus wider complaints about women’s reproductive healthcare. She argued men would face totally different treatment and joked that “if men got pregnant, you could get an abortion from a vending machine.”
Obama then piled on with the trophies and birth-Olympics material. The pair framed the whole bit as proof that men and women experience parenthood differently, and that men would turn pregnancy into a public victory lap.
Online commenters rejected the joke. One asked, “Just like some women can already do?” Another wrote, “What’s the humor here??”
A third called it outright: “The ignorance is astounding.” Others said the former first lady was mocking men over the same physical reality women have long wanted taken seriously.
"Imagine mocking men for something that women have been asking to be taken seriously about for decades,"
one user posted. More reactions piled on: “What point was she even trying to make?” “Women deserve recognition for what they go through during pregnancy too, but this joke missed the mark.” “That was an incredibly strange thing to joke about.”
No public response from Obama, Stone, or the podcast to the criticism appears in the available account of the episode.
The exchange leaned on a familiar progressive script: men would magically fix or glorify every hardship women face if the biology were reversed. Obama’s version added trophies, filmed labor, and epidural high-fives.
Critics heard something else, a celebrity podcast reducing pregnancy and childbirth to a punchline that scored points against men while claiming to defend women. The comments treated the bit as tone-deaf rather than insightful.
Pregnancy remains hard, physical work whether a first lady jokes about it or not. Turning that fact into a dig at half the population did not land as solidarity with mothers. It landed as a cheap shot that even sympathetic listeners called strange and off-target.
When the punchline needs a trophy ceremony to work, ordinary people notice, and they say so out loud.
