Sharon Stone, Michelle Obama joke about male pregnancy on podcast

Actress Sharon Stone and former first lady Michelle Obama joked about what would happen if men could get pregnant during the latest episode of “IMO,” the podcast Ms. Obama hosts with her brother, Craig Robinson.

“If men got pregnant, you could get an abortion from a vending machine,” Ms. Stone said, Entertainment Weekly reported. Ms. Obama responded that “there would be the birth-Olympics,” imagining men filming themselves in labor and receiving trophies for enduring it without an epidural. Ms. Stone added that maternity leave would come with a bonus.

The exchange followed Ms. Stone’s account of getting an abortion as a teenager. She said she received almost no sex education and didn’t realize she was pregnant until her boyfriend noticed her weight gain. She first wrote about the abortion in her 2021 memoir, “The Beauty of Living Twice.”

Ms. Stone also said tampons weren’t tested with human blood until 2026. Researchers at Oregon Health & Science University published what they described as the first such study in 2023, filling 21 menstrual products with expired human packed red blood cells. That is closer to real menstrual blood than saline, but it is not an exact match, since menstrual blood also contains clots and secretions. Scientific American reported that manufacturers still predominantly use saline solution to test menstrual products.

Ms. Stone said, too, that some people want to prosecute women for miscarriages. The advocacy group Pregnancy Justice has identified 58 prosecutions from 2006 to 2024 tied to how people handled the aftermath of a pregnancy loss, including the handling of remains. Those cases concern conduct after a loss, not the miscarriage itself. The group says the figure is an undercount.