Women who miscalculate are called mothers.

The line is a barbed, epigrammatic joke about how society reframes women’s “mistakes” in sexual or reproductive matters. A “miscalculation” implies an error in timing, judgment, or contraception; the punchline—“are called mothers”—suggests that what might be labeled a blunder is socially converted into a sanctioned identity once a child results. The humor depends on irony: motherhood is culturally idealized, yet here it is presented as an outcome of error rather than intention. Read more broadly, it critiques the gendered asymmetry of consequences and labels: women bear the visible, life-altering result and the accompanying social narrative, while men’s comparable “miscalculations” often remain less publicly named.