¤ milky moon ¤

Hello! I've been reading through the forums here for a while now, but I've never posted before or anything, so here goes.

I was looking at the older threads on this website and I ended up reading a thread about whether or not Baby Birch is about abortion, and it got me thinking about this part of the song:
"There is a blacksmith,
and there is a shepherd,
and there is a butcher-boy,
and there is a barber, who's cutting
and cutting away at my only joy."
I get the impression that most people think that the barber Joanna mentions is cutting her hair, but I don't think that is the case. I used to wonder what on earth the speaker getting her hair cut had to do with the rest of the song, and the lyric always seemed kind of random. But you know, I recently remembered that I've been told that in the olden days barbers not only cut hair, they performed surgeries. So because of this I have come to believe that the "only joy" the narrator refers to is not her hair, but rather her baby. I just wanted to bring this up, because I wasn't sure if other people had thought of this. Whenever people talk about this song and why they believe it is/isn't about abortion, they never really mention this line, which seems odd to me because it is a very key line if you look at it as the barber being a surgeon, not a hair-cutter.

Well, the song always sounds like it is about abortion to me (or at least the possibility of having a baby with a past love), but I don't know if this line is necessarily about that. Remember in Only Skin when she says "when I cut your hair, and leave the birds all of the trimmings, I'm the happiest woman among all women"? I think maybe this line in Baby Birch is about imagining your ex with someone else, or even alone, someone else cutting their hair when you used to enjoy doing that together. The fact that you can make a decision that just instantly destroys the possibility of a life together/a child (skinning the rabbit, metaphorically)

I've always connected this lyric and the one about cutting hair in Only Skkn to be a gendered symbol

I've read about the barber/surgeon theory before, maybe the line has a double meaning. It's her most painful song for me to listen to, I definitely think it's about abortion.

I don't really understand the 'argument' about what it's about; if Joanna never tells us what it's about, one interpretation is still as valid as another, and even if she does, if some people interpreted it otherwise, the song they interpreted is still the same. The meaning arises from interpretation; it's not inherent to the text.