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Michelle Obama was laughing when she said it, and a few seconds of audio have since set off a pile-on across Instagram. The comment came during the Sept. 30 episode of IMO with Michelle Obama & Craig Robinson, the show she co-hosts with her brother. A guest had just offered a quip about pregnancy, and Obama answered with a bit of her own. Reaction online has been swift, and much of it is sharply critical.
That guest was Sharon Stone, 68, who used her appearance to talk about an abortion she had at 18 and kept secret at the time. She first made the experience public in her 2021 memoir, The Beauty of Living Twice, and on the show she recalled that her family blamed her weight gain on the so-called freshman 15. Her frustration with how women’s health care gets handled was plain throughout, and it set up the line that followed.
Stone put it this way, according to Fox News Digital: “If men got pregnant, you could get an abortion from a vending machine.” Obama laughed, then took the premise somewhere of her own. She imagined how men would behave if childbirth were theirs to handle, and the scenario she built is now the center of the criticism.
Obama Imagines a ‘Birth Olympics’ Where Men Film Their Labor and Hand Out Awards
Obama called her idea the “birth Olympics.” In her telling, men would record their own trips to the delivery room and treat their pain as something worth honoring, turning an ordeal into a spectator event. She built the scene out loud, adding detail as she went. Every Olympics needs a medal ceremony, and she had one ready.
Trophies, she said, would be part of it. Obama pictured men congratulating one another and singling out a man named Bob for skipping the epidural, laughing as she played the crowd. Stone added a line about paternity leave arriving “when you got the bonus,” according to Political.org. Listeners were left to decide what point, if any, the comparison was meant to make.
Within days, the segment was circulating well beyond the episode itself. Fox News Digital covered Stone’s remarks and sought comment from her representative, while Instagram users turned their attention to Obama’s half of the exchange. The first replies were short, and several were phrased as questions.
Instagram Commenters Turn Obama’s Trophy Bit Around and Ask Where the Humor Is
The earliest reactions were puzzled. One user asked whether women already do this, a reply that turned the joke’s premise back on itself. Another demanded to know “What’s the humor here??” A third wanted to understand what point Obama was even trying to land. Each of them wrote as though the punchline had skipped something.
Other commenters skipped the questions and delivered a verdict. One called the remark ignorant. Another argued the joke ridiculed men over an issue women have long struggled to get acknowledged. A third agreed that pregnancy deserves more public acknowledgment but said the joke fell flat, and a final user called the topic an odd choice for humor. Almost all of it was aimed at Obama.
The sharpest institutional criticism targeted someone else. Laura Echevarria, the communications director at National Right to Life, criticized Stone’s remarks in a comment to Fox News Digital. Her anti-abortion group objected to the vending machine line rather than Obama’s trophies. Obama has dealt with this kind of pushback before, and her podcast has a recent history of drawing it.
Obama Said Men ‘Have No Idea’ What Women Face in 2025, and Critics Were Waiting Then Too
Obama has been through a version of this before. On a May 2025 episode featuring OB-GYN Dr. Sharon Malone, she told listeners, “So many men have no idea about what women go through.” The same conversation produced a separate flashpoint when she described creating life as “the least” of what a woman’s reproductive system does, which Fox News reported drew backlash. A third remark from that episode targeted men who stay on the sidelines of abortion policy.
Stone arrived at the Obama recording fresh from controversy of her own. Days earlier, she told People that Sydney Sweeney needed to “take responsibility” for a provocative ad promoting the prediction platform Novig, according to Fox News. Stone argued that women’s sports should not be diminished to catch men’s attention for gambling, recalling her own push to make a boys’ team. Her podcast appearance landed in the middle of that argument.
Stone kept her abortion at 18 private for decades before putting it in print in 2021, and her appearance on Obama’s show carried that story to a fresh audience. Online attention has since drifted to a different part of the episode: a hypothetical about men, trophies and a man named Bob. For many commenters, that bit became the headline, and the account that anchored the conversation took second place.