Because the article I brought up points out that pregnancy and nursing decrease your odds of breast cancer. Niursing is widely noted fertility supressor and linked with a decrease in reproductive cancers, especially if you nurse for at least six months. I am not a doctor but I think the probable answer about what caused Elizabeth Edwards’ cancer is that we don’t really know. The evidence on mammograms is actually sort of contradictory. My own OB told me I should get one each year once I’ve stopped nursing even though the official recommendation is now otherwise for women in their forties.
BTW, it is quite likely, given her age, that her last two pregnancies were donor eggs. DE does not involve the use of as many hormones as traditional IVF treatment as the woman in question is not seeking to produce multiple eggs. I don’t think it quite accurate to state that she “flooded” her body with hormones anymore that it might be to state that of any other woman who had three children.
My wording was wrong. I didn’t mean, “Of all living women in xyz time period, many (as in a suggestion of most) had 18+ children.” But ten, twelve, fifteen pregnancies would not have been unusual. Some may have died in utero and some in a young age, but that’s still getting knocked up. And babies that made it to full term would count.
I mean its’ been done before. I have a feeling Dopers would be riled at 8 or 12.
Bleh. I don’t like telling people what to do with their uteruses. It seems like the Duggars can provide for their kids and they love them.
While women did commonly have more pregnancies in the past, I doubt that it was as many as a dozen per woman. My Grandma Bodoni was an observant Catholic, and she only had half a dozen kids…and as far as I know, no miscarriages. Now, it’s quite possible that I wasn’t told of miscarriages, but I very much doubt that she had miscarried half of her pregnancies. The thing is, people knew that sex caused pregnancies, so a lot of people avoided sex if they didn’t want to have a kid. From what I’ve heard, Grandma Bodoni (and I presume Grandpa Bodoni) had dry spells of a couple of years between the birth of one child and the pregnancy of the next, precisely because they didn’t want to have more kids.
The Duggars might be able to financially provide for their kids, but the adults are not really parenting. They shift that burden on to the older kids. And I really have to question whether they love those kids for themselves, or only as arrows in that quiver.
Maybe if they weren’t so eager to shift child-rearing responsibilities to older siblings (and volunteers who step in to help), the parents would be too tired to have sex.
Large families are naturally self-regulating in this way.
Too bad Michelle Duggar doesn’t seem to be capable of giving her existing children a fraction of the interest and energy she puts into staying pregnant. I disagree with just about everything that family does. It makes no sense at all for them to have 20 kids that they don’t educate or allow out into the world. I feel especially sorry for the older daughters and the neglected little kids.
The largest average family size of any religion in the U.S. is Hasidic Jews; they have an average of 8 children. (Cite) That’s more than the two religions most commonly associated with large families- Mormons (~4) and Catholics (~3)- combined. (Mormons and Catholics, at least as individuals, seem to have relaxed some of their stances on birth control in the past half century while to the Hasidim it’s still a really major no-no.) What’s interesting is that the number of average children of a Hasidic, Mormon, and Catholic family combined would still be less than the Duggers with room left over for a Protestant family.
Yikes! Maybe 18 pregnancies is exceedingly rare. Hasidic Jews also may practice birth control. My grandmother had 12 pregnancies (and purposely dry periods as well), but only 7 kids. But if you have multiples, that quickly ups your number. So ultra-Orthodox families may have 10 plus kids. I guess 18 is a stretch. But even if the woman had ten kids, again, I think Dopers would be judgy. Also, the Duggars have two sets of twins.
I guess if they’ve been having kids at a young age and are still having them…she’s still in her ‘childbearing’ years.
Not that I think having a billion kids is a good idea. I just can’t judge other people’s actions when it comes to this.
So many pregnancies and deliveries has got to put a fuckton of stress on a body; especially when her last pregnancy ended with a premature baby girl, a c-section and what else?
She is pushing luck as hard as she can and it might not end well. She could die, have a Down’s syndrome baby and who knows what else.
I don’t agree with her religion or her way of life but this is a huge train-wreck, happening in full view of everyone.
I don’t know if these kids have access to library cards but you can get romance novels and pick up stuff about sex that way/.
First and foremost, I feel badly for the children of this couple. I’ve never seen the TV show, so I have no idea how things work in this family… but to have that many children deprives them all of a certain level of bonding with the parents. Maybe that’s to be expected in their religion, i don’t know.
And if one of her older children starts having children of her own, does mom get to stop?
For a woman, I’d think this type of religion would suck, because it seems that you are expected to be on your back immediately following the birth of your child, in a perpetual state of uterine jiffy-popping until menopause.
Putting these people on TV is as irresponsible as them trying to continue to procreate. Television executives are money whores who just exploit others for their own personal gain. TLC execs can’t wait for her to get pregnant again, and I’m sure another miscarriage would be just fine, especially during sweeps week! And if she died? Bonus ratings!
I really think it would be great if they would drag these two onto Maury Povich, and get that cheap, pathetic, poor man’s excuse for Jerry Springer to go through a DNA testing on all 19 kids. How much would it be worth to hear “You are NOT the father!”
The continuation of this nation’s decline continues.
Please. Michelle Duggar is one woman, not an army. And the number of Quiverful families is still really small. Her existence is not an indication of the nation’s decline, and her reality show is a blip especially in comparison to the “how wasted am I?!?!” reality shows like Jersey Shore.
Indeed, the large families that I am personally aware of are all Hasidic Jews. Knowing them is what makes me wary of judging people with large families, even though I don’t expect to have many children myself.
And Michelle Duggar may be one woman, but she is reproducing like a queen at the center of a beehive. 20 kids - not an entire army, but what… a couple of squads, or half a platoon?