In an interview with Exclusive, lead singer and songwriter Brian Vander Ark stated that the incident which inspired the song was when his pregnant girlfriend had an abortion.

[5]Vander Ark told the Boston Globe in 2022 that he hadn't originally intended to write a song about abortion, but that once he'd keyed in on the grounding phrase—"stop a baby's breath, and a shoe full of rice"—it allowed him to tap into his ambivalence over the experience: "Growing up in a very conservative Reform Christian home, I struggled with guilt.

Referring to RCA Records' 1999 decision to cancel the U.S. release of the Swedish singer Robyn's album My Truth, which included songs about her 1998 abortion, Vander Ark said, "RCA did not put up any roadblocks, never talked to us about changing a lyric, never seemed to even care.

It's sad, too, especially on an album called My Truth, when you have this gutsy openness, to then get silenced by male gatekeepers in the industry.

Later that year, the band recorded the song again, this time with the producer Jack Joseph Puig,[7] for release as a single in January 1997.