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Duggar Family Pushes Anti-Birth Control Views As GOP Gains Power And Women Worry About Contraceptive Access

By Treva Bowdoin
Published on: 09:33 PST, Nov 12, 2016

The Duggar family may be one of the largest in America, but Counting On stars Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar recently revealed that they aren’t satisfied with having 19 kids. According to the conservative fundamentalist Christians, they wish that Michelle had never been on birth control because it prevented them from adding even more children to their massive family. They even believe that the birth control pill caused Michelle to miscarry many years ago.

In a November 11 post on the Duggar Family Official Facebook page, Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar explained why they are against birth control.

“Children are a blessing from God!” the former 19 Kids and Counting stars wrote. “For years we did not understand that and we missed out on some of those blessings.”

The Facebook post also included a link to a five-year-old video that the Duggar family filmed for The 700 Club. In the video, Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar reveal that they actually used birth control in the early years of their marriage. However, their opinion about family planning changed after Michelle miscarried her second pregnancy.

Michelle Duggar was on the pill for the first three years of their marriage. She went off of it when she and Jim Bob decided that they were ready to start a family, and she gave birth to their first son, Josh, in 1988. Michelle then went back on the pill.

“I ended up getting pregnant while on the pill,” Michelle says. “We ended up losing that baby.”

According to Jim Bob Duggar, he and his wife later talked to an unidentified doctor who told them that the pill can cause women to miscarry if they get pregnant while taking it. Michelle Duggar believes that she and Jim Bob allowed one of their “babies to be destroyed” due to their “lack of knowledge.”

However, as Columbia Health’s Go Ask Alice! Q&A column explains, taking oral contraceptives while pregnant can’t cause miscarriages because “they do not have any effect on a fertilized embryo.”

“Birth control pills — generally made of estrogen and progestin (synthetic progesterone) — essentially prevent pregnancy by inhibiting ovulation and/or causing the cervical mucus to thicken.”

In other words, the Duggar family is spreading misinformation about oral contraceptives.

It’s possible that Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar are drawing attention to their family’s anti-birth control views because they see an opportunity to force their way of living on the rest of the country now that the GOP is about to be in control of the House, the Senate, and the presidency.

As Politico reported, the Duggar family has been very politically active in the past, with Jim Bob even claiming that God called him to run for a U.S. Senate seat in 2002. He lost the race, and the Duggar family had to settle for trying to shape politics by hitting the campaign trail for the many conservative Republican candidates that they’ve supported over the years. However, the family hasn’t been doing any campaigning this year. This is likely because Josh Duggar’s incestuous sexual molestation scandal led to him resigning from his leadership position with the Family Research Council, a right-wing Christian lobbying organization.

The Duggar family may be feeling empowered now that the political party that shares their views on abortion has control of the country, so their anti-birth control video could be the first of many attempts to shape America into the Christian theocracy that they seemingly want it to be. However, millions of American women don’t want to live like Michelle Duggar by leaving the number of “blessings” they have “up to God.”

As USA Today reports, many women fear that they will lose access to affordable birth control if Republican politicians make good on their campaign promises. President-elect Donald Trump has said that he wants to cut funding to Planned Parenthood and gut Obamacare, a move that has inspired many women to research intrauterine devices (IUDs). This form of birth control is placed in the uterus and can last up to 12 years. However, IUDs are expensive.

Republican politicians and the Duggar family may face an angry American public if they fight too hard to limit women’s access to other more affordable forms of birth control.

“The vast majority of the public across political parties, across demographic groups and across religious identities support birth control access for women,” said Ginny Ehrlich, CEO of The National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy.

Like Donald Trump and Mike Pence, Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar have made it very clear that they’re against abortion. However, most of their fellow Republicans aren’t against birth control. According to Ehrlich, a majority of the party — 74 percent, to be exact — believe that anti-choicers like the Duggar family should support birth control.

[Featured Image by Brendan Hoffman/Getty Images]

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