I am honestly only here for fact-checking. I find this song to be heartbreaking and hard, and beautiful, like many of Joanna Newsom's songs, but I don't want to presume on her experience, only on the interpretations I'm seeing in the thread. (And I'm enough of a postmodernist to believe that if we hear these interpretations, they are reasonable, regardless of her intent! Her lyrics are complex enough to count as literature and I think they should be treated as such and I'm not sure fretting on about authorial intent is the be-all and end-all of interpreting them!)
That said, an additional fact: it is not unusual for doctors to get involved in miscarriages, especially late or incomplete miscarriages, because they can be dangerous, and miscarriages are very common, especially in young women who have never been pregnant before. The imagery at the end could mean any of a thousand things, but if we want to talk about it involving the end of a pregnancy, it could mean that.
Now my two cents: I personally - in my own personal politics and beliefs - certainly do think of abortions more as roads not taken, so to me that interpretation would ring true. But there are so many babies that people could have had if things had been a little different! There are the babies that could have been born if you'd been a little drunker or less shy or more forgetful or better or worse at math! There are the babies that could have been born if you just hadn't started an argument over whose turn it was to do the dishes, and the babies that could have been born if you'd skipped class that morning, and the babies that could have been born if the pregnancy hadn't miscarried, and the babies that could have been born if you hadn't broken up, and the babies that could have been born if you hadn't gotten an abortion. Every time we make a choice we shut out a whole bunch of other choices, all the time. How many missed chances are we supposed to live our lives for, anyway? But I think there are certain choices that come to represent how we expected our lives to turn out one way, and they didn't, and there's a whole lot of Joanna Newsom songs that seem to be about that kind of choice. She is a brilliant and articulate woman, and I wish her every luck.
I am honestly only here for fact-checking. I find this song to be heartbreaking and hard, and beautiful, like many of Joanna Newsom's songs, but I don't want to presume on her experience, only on the interpretations I'm seeing in the thread. (And I'm enough of a postmodernist to believe that if we hear these interpretations, they are reasonable, regardless of her intent! Her lyrics are complex enough to count as literature and I think they should be treated as such and I'm not sure fretting on about authorial intent is the be-all and end-all of interpreting them!)
That said, an additional fact: it is not unusual for doctors to get involved in miscarriages, especially late or incomplete miscarriages, because they can be dangerous, and miscarriages are very common, especially in young women who have never been pregnant before. The imagery at the end could mean any of a thousand things, but if we want to talk about it involving the end of a pregnancy, it could mean that.
Now my two cents: I personally - in my own personal politics and beliefs - certainly do think of abortions more as roads not taken, so to me that interpretation would ring true. But there are so many babies that people could have had if things had been a little different! There are the babies that could have been born if you'd been a little drunker or less shy or more forgetful or better or worse at math! There are the babies that could have been born if you just hadn't started an argument over whose turn it was to do the dishes, and the babies that could have been born if you'd skipped class that morning, and the babies that could have been born if the pregnancy hadn't miscarried, and the babies that could have been born if you hadn't broken up, and the babies that could have been born if you hadn't gotten an abortion. Every time we make a choice we shut out a whole bunch of other choices, all the time. How many missed chances are we supposed to live our lives for, anyway? But I think there are certain choices that come to represent how we expected our lives to turn out one way, and they didn't, and there's a whole lot of Joanna Newsom songs that seem to be about that kind of choice. She is a brilliant and articulate woman, and I wish her every luck.