Ew.
I bet her ex-boyfriends are thanking God now.
No kidding - what the hell is congodwarf doing with Michelle Duggar’s old miscarried fetus?
My wife told me about this show, which she’d seen in passing recently. Looking it up, I saw the name Duggar and says to myself, “I’ve seen that name somewheres. Was it on the Dope?” Sure enough!
My first thoughts, and I haven’t seen any of the show or done any research about it or the Duggars beyond reading this thread, were of the medical “professionals” involved. At what point does the doctor step back and say, “Having this many children poses high risks to both the mother’s body and the unborn children. I advise you (the Duggar parents) not to have any more children. Should you choose to ignore this advice, I will not be offering my medical services to you any longer.”
Were I the doctor in question, I think I’d have reached such a point several children ago. Wouldn’t stop them from finding another doctor, of course, and there are likely doctors (plural) directly involved in this Quiverful movement anyway. Stands to reason, with high rates of childbirth being apparently a main tenet of this religious belief.
In the end, this is yet another piece of the world that makes me shake my head and withdraw another step.
Replace “parents” with “teachers” and “children” / “kids” with “students”, and you have the US education system.
Many Quiverfull practitioners utilize medical personnel that are within the movement. A lot of them also insist on home births or are forced into home births due to a lack of support from medical personnel.
Nice non-sequitur. You do realize that parents and children are generally expected to have somewhat of a different relationship than teachers and students?
Anna did have a homebirth with a midwife. I’m not sure wether it was a nurse-midwife or a lay one though. Granted she doesn’t have anywhere near the amount of risk factors Michelle has, yet.
Schools with young children have a mandated teacher:child ratio much lower than that family. Hell, my daughter’s public kindergarten only had 14 and preschool was 8:1.
Stupid analogy all around.
Eh. You only live once. If your big mission in life is to have 20 kids, and you can do it without being abusive, then it’s no skin off my back. Who knows, maybe they are right and have life all figured out, and we are the ones who are wrong.
In any case, I’ve probably used 20 kid’s worth of carbon in airline tickets in the past few years. Every single person on this message board consumes far more than their fair share of the Earth’s resources.
I can’t disagree with that, but I still think having 20 kids for what is (to me) not a good reason is still a bad idea. Actually, I can’t think of a good reason to have 20 kids.
[QUOTE=even sven]
Who knows, maybe they are right and have life all figured out, and we are the ones who are wrong.
[/QUOTE]
Yeah, maybe a worldwide population of seven hundred billion by 2050 would be awesome. 
The rumor is that they’re going to surprise the younger kids for the Christmas episode by having mommy give birth to a pony.
I watched the show for a while and it irked me how damned nice they all seem to be, and not in a Stepford way. Yes, there’s a whole hell of a lot of them, but if somebody’s going to be having kids, they do a better job than many.
That said, I really do hope this is the last. Whether her third child or twentieth, it’s too high a risk anymore.
Seconded. I hope they call it a day after #20. I hope that this pregnancy goes smoothly, and there’s no adverse effects for them, and I also hope that they devote at least SOME time to discussing how risky it really is to get pregnant at 45 after having had 19 children already.
I just cringe when I think of all the 45 year old women that are longing for another baby, watching their show and see the Duggar mom and think, “Hey, it worked out for them, why not me?”… when the rate of Down Syndrome for moms over 45 is something to the tune of 1 in 15 (I would be seriously, seriously terrified of rolling those dice, if I were Michelle Duggar) not to mention all the other many pitfalls one must avoid to have a good outcome in this scenario.
At least it’s not twins.
I knew, of course, that the older the mother at the time of pregnancy the higher the risk of Down Syndrome, but what I didn’t realize until fairly recently is that after 40 the risk of D.S. doesn’t rise steadily, it skyrockets.
A 35 year old mother has only marginally (almost insignificantly) higher odds of having a D.S. child than a 20 year old mother, but a 39 year old mother has twice the chance of having a D.S. child than a 35 year old and a 49 year old mother has 5 times the chances of a 40 year old/10 times the chances of a 30 year old.
That said, most babies born to women over 40 are born perfectly healthy, but she’s already had one problem pregnancy and pre-eclampsia, plus even for a 21 year old mother most doctors recommend waiting at least a full year before even trying to get pregnant again and some recommend as long as 3 years between children in order to let your body fully recover. This woman manages to get pregnant during labor. She’s really spinning the barrel.
At this point, she could probably push that pony out in five minutes.
I just found out this fact and it almost seems relevant!
[QUOTE=Wikipedia]
Jean Chrétien, 20th Prime Minister of Canada, was born on January 11, 1934, in Shawinigan, Quebec, as the **18th of 19 children **(10 of whom did not survive infancy)[1] to Wellie Chrétien and Marie (née Boisvert).
[/QUOTE]
There’s a family that’s been on the news in Alabama several times (though not for years, so perhaps one of them is dead now) who had, I believe, twenty-four children including several sets of twins. They would never get a TV show like the Duggars because they were impoverished, received every kind of state assistance, and were falling-down-stupid if not actually retarded. They lived in a rambling shack in the country and were often shown at holidays and the like, and I’m guessing most of the footage got left in the editing room because you totally expected banjos and shotguns to come into the camera at any time.
One of the queens of Hawaii was the mother of more than twenty children, most of whom died in infancy. Queen Anne of England had at least fourteen and as many as eighteen depending on the source, all but one of whom died in infancy (and the one who survived infancy died as a boy).
The Hardy Family? Times Daily - Google News Archive Search
I remember reading about them in High School. Truly impoverished but happy as could be.
No, but I remember them being on the news too. The family I’m thinking about was bonafide hillbilly and lived up in the north of the state. (There was also a couple that had been married for 80+ years [they married as teenagers] that used to be featured each year on their anniversary; they didn’t have 20 kids but they had an army of descendants due to their longevity and most of the girls giving birth young).