Mother's Day Joke From IHOP Displeases Twitter

If IHOP wanted only to generate attention with a jokey Mother's Day tweet, mission accomplished. If it wanted to charm everyone, not so much. The tweet in question shows a photoshopped image of a uterus in an ultrasound filled with a stack of pancakes. "If you have pancakes in your tum tum, does that make you a pancake mum mum? Happy Mother’s Day to ALL the moms out there!" The tweet has more than 5,000 likes, but Business Insider notes that it also has lots and lots of negative reaction. One common theme focuses on basic anatomy, as voiced in this tweet: "I feel comfortable enough in my medical training thus far to confirm that the uterus is NOT in fact connected to the GI tract."

Another is that the tweet comes at a particularly volatile time in the abortion debate, with multiple states enacting strict "heartbeat" restrictions. "And @IHOP weighs into the most controversial space in American politics in the last 50 years," tweeted writer Molly Jong-Fast. At AdWeek, David Griner runs through all of this and more. "The tweet raises so many questions. Just, so many," he writes. "But the only question that really matters is: Good god, why?" No official reaction yet from IHOP, which likes to take an aggressive approach in its social media campaigns. (Remember the "name change" that wasn't?)