Sharon Stone was 18 when she discovered she was pregnant.
Neither she nor her then-boyfriend knew enough about contraception, and no one at home suspected a thing: her parents thought the change in her body was due to the famous “freshman 15”, those extra pounds many students gain during their first year of college. “I could have been the girl giving birth in the bathroom”, the actress recalled.
Stone shared this experience during a conversation with Michelle Obama on the “IMO” podcast and used it to talk about the difficulties many women, she argued, still face in accessing reproductive health care. That was when she made a comparison that made Obama laugh: “If men got pregnant, you could get an abortion from a vending machine”.
Obama went along with the joke, imagining that if men were the ones giving birth, there would even be “Childbirth Olympics”, with trophies for those who endured the process. The episode was published on September 30, 2026.