Rachel Campos-Duffy stunned fans in May when she was announced she was pregnant with her ninth child. In a surprising Instagram post, The Real World: San Francisco veteran-turned-Fox News contributor wrote that she and her husband, U.S. Representative Sean Duffy, found out that they were expecting another baby this fall.
“We found out God isn’t done with our family yet. Baby #9 coming this fall! Don’t tell us we’re crazy. We prefer brave and full of hope for America’s future!” Campos-Duffy wrote at the time.
The 47-year-old mom-to-be elaborated on her pregnancy on Fox & Friends , saying “there’s always room in our house” for more, People notes.
The couple’s other eight kids – Evita Pilar, Patrick Miguel, Margarita, Maris-Victoria, Paloma, John-Paul, Lucia-Belén, and Xavier Jack – range in age from 2 to 19. MTV fans first met Campos-Duffy when she was on the groundbreaking third season of The Real World with the late HIV-positive AIDS educator Pedro Zamora and the memorable bad boy “Puck” Rainey.
“It was a very long, cold winter, I have a very cute husband, it was bound to happen, and here we are,” Campos-Duffy explained.
In a new interview with The National Review , Campos-Duffy said that while most of the reaction to her big baby news has been positive, some commenters had “awful things to say about people with large families.” Campos-Duffy said haters told her to keep her legs closed and she was even called “an environmental terrorist.”
Campos-Duffy also revealed that she never set out to have nine kids and that none of her children were “planned” pregnancies.
“I didn’t have a number in mind. We didn’t plan one of my kids; they just kind of happened… To be honest, this last one was kind of a surprise. I thought I was getting a little old. But apparently not!”
In the interview, the 47-year-old Fox Nation star also made a case for creating more human life, noting that the world’s environmental, medical, and political problems are going to be solved by humans, so “more humans seems like a good idea to me.”
When asked if having so many kids means you can’t give them all enough love and attention, Campos-Duffy offered a retort aimed at smaller families, pointing out that perhaps having too few kids means they get “too much attention, get too much done for them, or become too self-centered.” The MTV veteran admitted that there are pitfalls on both sides of the spectrum and that it is a constant struggle to see each of her kids as an individual.
As for critics who claim the Duffys are taking advantage of public services and eating up public resources by having so many children, Campos-Duffy invited them to take a look at her tax bill.
“I pay a lot of money in taxes. … I know there are folks on the left who think I’m an ‘environmental terrorist,’ and all this kind of stuff. I think I’m raising some good, interesting, smart, productive, conscientious kids and putting them in the world, and hopefully they’ll give back more than their carbon footprint.”
Rachel Campos met her future husband, Sean Duffy, while filming MTV’s Road Rules: All-Stars in 1998. Duffy previously appeared on The Real World: Boston , which was the sixth season of the MTV reality show, and he currently serves as the U.S. Representative for Wisconsin’s 7th congressional district.