 According to the folklorist scholar Alan Dundes, the dead baby joke cycle likely began in the early 1960s.Dundes theorizes that the origin of the dead baby joke lies in the rise of second-wave feminism in the U.S. during that decade and its rejection of the traditional societal role for women, which included support for legalized abortion and contraceptives.It has also been suggested that the jokes emerged in response to images of graphic violence, often involving infants, from the Vietnam War.