You know, the Duggars! Michelle and Jim Bob and their 19 kids and counting? Back in May, we learned about how this crazy couple was open to having more children (they let God make the call on the babies, you know), and it looks like they weren’t foolin’, because Michelle is three and a half months pregnant! Oh, and 45 years old. Also, her last kid weighed in at one pound, six ounces at birth. But 20 kids sounds awesome, huh?!
Congrats, Duggars! Let’s hope this kid doesn’t come into the world with severe, life-endangering birth defects or any kind of horrific chronic condition because of your selfishness, and be sure and invite us to the baby shower!
also, i hope she doesn’t die and leave nearly 20 children without a mother. how do they manage to parent properly? we knew a woman with 10 kids a few years ago and the middle children were really strange, cos they never got noticed, one of them managed to get through school without being able to read.
we are so overpopulated it WILL be the reason for human extinction. it sucks because the generation to see us to the end will all be like the duggars. I’m sure it was god’s plan for you to bring us speedily to our doomsday.
One of my aunts has 22 kids. Not because it was “God’s will” but because she and her ex-husband couldn’t be bothered to use protection.
At least the Duggar’s can support themselves and don’t rely on handouts.
Who fucking cares if she has more kids.
They’re not on public assistance like the massive population of minority bitches crapping out dozens of bastard, gangbanger kids are…so more power to her. Have as many as you want so long as I’m not paying for it.
You may not be paying for her flock of seaglls yet, but one never knows hoe well the 20 will fare in the future. I can almost promise you that someday, you will be paying for one or twelve of them. believe that!
**Seagulls
Oh you can promise me that? That makes sense. But “hoe” [sic] do you know that, oh wise one?? So is your 5 year old going to be a stripper or gangbanger that society will end up paying for? BUT HOW DO WE KNOW IT WON’T BE THOSE BAD THINGS?? That’s the funny thing about logic…
I despise them. Public assistance or not. THEY MAKE ME SICK. Goodnight
How can these folks make you sick? I live near the Duggars and recently met Michelle at one of her speaking engagements. She has got to be one of the kindest people I’ve ever met. She truly loves being a mother and has dedicated her life to raising her children. I also met some of her older daughters – they were bright, polite, friendly, and overall some of the most respectable young ladies I’ve ever met. Any mom would be proud to have children like hers. They all work as a team and the parents make individual time for each child – none of them are lost in the shuffle.
The people who make me sick are those like my sister in law. She just quit her job because it was “too stressful”, has 2 children by 2 different boyfriends, neither of which she or the fathers can support – nor do any of them care to work hard enough to support their kids. Her children are neglected, abused (by my standards, not legally), and she uses the system to it’s fullest extent. She also uses and abuses my in laws to enable her lifestyle. It is utterly pathetic. It’s people like her who are ruining our society, not the Duggars. Their 20 kids won’t even be a dent in the offset of all the other ill mannered, uneducated, disrespectful children coming from the “entitlement class”. I hope the Duggars have as many children as possible.
And just a side note, I think any woman living on entitlements of any type should be required to be on birth control via an IUD or Depo shot. Put all that welfare money back in the pockets of middle class families and give our country a chance. My husband and I – both college educated and devoted parents – can’t afford more kids. But my sister in law? She can get knocked up tomorrow, not have to worry about a single additional expense, and get upgraded to a bigger place to live. If you support the system as it exists today, you are part of the PROBLEM.
She “despises them” because she’s ignorant. Why would you despise people who work for their living, which is all this amounts to?
Your comment was both insightful and truthful. If under earning women were forced to be put on birth control, not only would society benefit monetarily but crimes, drugs, violence and the cycle itself would cease to exist for the most part. Almost every crime is rooted in an awful life of the criminal – which has to do with unmarried “parents”, if they even deserve to be called that. BUT OH NO – that would be an invasion of civil rights…let’s focus on that and not on the perpetual rape of our other most basic rights which occurs day after day at the hands of the U.S. Government in the name of fear.
In the end these people were smart enough to capitalize on their “situation” and make money for their family. People become envious and hateful because they are loving, Christian people who are on TV, have lots of children and do it all on their own without a dime from me or you. Rock on with the logic, JD.
I’m ignorant… OK.. You got it. Oh look, The Loving Christian line pops up. OF COURSE IT DOES.. It always does with people who have little else to say or contribute.. lets take it to the church..
Hear hear!
Your sister in law may make me sick as well. As for being such a kind dedicated Mom & human.PLS, spare me. MD has loads of help.. As is 15 kids at least doing what a loving Mom should do. She gave birth to babysitters actually. Wow, she has time for speaking engagements? I have one 5yr old daughter and a full time job and I barely have time to go grocery shopping..Must be nice, she is fu–ing Wonder Woman..
OMG! THE LOVING CHRISTIAN LINE POPPED UP!! RELIGION = BAD, ME = GOOD!!!! That’s what you sound like. I had plenty to say, just like JD. Just because you’re too stupid to understand my post doesn’t mean it doesn’t say anything. Idiot.
Congrats on the 20th hope all goes well…Some people are just jealous!!!
Hello I totally Agree with what your saying I love this Family they have inspired me to buy used and save the difference, and not Only that they are a American Family that has shown their Love to ALL their Kids.
I watch them on you tube a lot and I can no wait to here about more kids in the future whether it is through adoption or through Conception.
I believe in a Large Family and I love large families because of that the kids have lots of people in the Family that they can play with and learn how to share toys and other things. I don’t believe by any means that the Duggars are in an occult group as some people think.
Shalom
Congratulations on passing your bigotry judgment on people you don’t even know.
Oh wait, that is what you do for a living.
so, forcing poor people to stay childless, because they are the problem? ..wow, good idea, hitler
What’s wrong with requiring birth control, at least for people who are on welfare? Same goes with forcing them to take random drug tests. People think that this is some violation of some inherent constitutional right that does not exist. Each state should require drug testing at the very least AND force women to go on birth control to keep costs down. And no, it doesn’t equate to being Hitler at all…it’s called fiscal responsibility. Those poor kids grow up in such shitty environments and they become society’s problem, so why not prevent it when we can?
Don’t you get it? Us middle class folks are the ones really paying the price here.
We are being FORCED to have smaller families in order to allow welfare moms to have all the children they want. How is that fair? And, yes, I believe that children are a priviledge. If it was 100 years ago, and all that mattered was that you planted an extra row of corn, made an extra pallet on the floor, and were willing to sew a few more clothes for the child – that’d be one thing. But in today’s society, a child costs anywhere from $200,000 to $500,000 to raise to adulthood (look it up). Those of us paying taxes are paying for these kids to have cheetos, get bigger places to live, go to the doctor for any old runny nose, etc. Why should anyone be entitled to take advantage of others in that way? In a country where just about everyone has the chance to go to college and better themselves, anyone can work their butt off at a job and make it, there is no excuse. My SIL lives in public housing that is as large as my husband and I’s house, she spends more on groceries every month than we do (by far), and so on. The welfare “entitlement” class is destroying the middle class – and ultimately the backbone of this country. If you want a large family, be willing to work hard for it. It’s not the same type of work it took 100 years ago, but it’s the same principle.
If not allowing those who can not afford children from becoming parents in order to prevent them leaching off of the system / taxpayers, then you can call me Hitler with a capital H. Children are a privilege, not a commodity or ‘right’. It is something *you* should have to work for, not the taxpayers.
The Duggars – I think Sarah’s major concern is for the welfare of the child, given the premature of birth of the previous one. Should the health of the coming baby not be at risk, and she is able to support it emotionally and financially, then more power to her. Should the health of infant be at risk, and she knew this going into the pregnancy, then it is rather shameful.
Sorry, ‘Sarah’ should be ‘Emily’. I was referring to the author of the article.
LegalEase,
I appreciate your comments in some ways, and by this I mean I appreciate your zeal and principles and good sense of humor, which match those of many of my friends and loved ones. And I can wholly assure you I will never raise a child in my craptacular apartment here in Chicago. Right now wind is blowing through it, and I am honestly relieved that there is a law here that says the heat cannot be turned off in wintertime, or else poor people would start dying off. The heat here is so expensive.
I recognize your handle, and from that I can only remember that I like you, but no, of course I don’t know you. I should preface by telling you I do not expect to change your heart.
However—and this might be a little bit of an overshare, and I must apologize to my coworkers and others here—I am a poor person, maybe even an impoverished person, and I have been very poor ever since I left a corporate job in California to take on caregiving for the two wonderful, elderly parents who adopted me. That is a stressful job, and it is also a good way to lose a lot of money, or maybe make a lot of negative money, I don’t know.
Maybe you should know I was also poor before I was adopted. I grew up on Zoom oatmeal and powdered milk and other boxed and canned foods, and my biological parents tried their very best, but eventually I was moved someplace else. I would like to remind you that you can not know what has made an ordinary person into a poor person. I am not too convinced the answer is babies, or race, or a lack of education, or whatever. My biological parents were terrible in exactly the way “ordinary” “normal” people are, but they were yet so much poorer.
I can tell you, though, that I sure love my adoptive mother, and I loved my adoptive father, but I would wish my experiences on no 26-year old. My mother and I elected to keep my father at home for the tenure of his Alzheimer’s, but then in the meantime my mother lost her ability to work because she lost her mobility and eyesight, and her kidneys failed, all due to MRSA, which is a type of contagious staph infection that can (and did) cause septic shock (three times). And when all this happened I had not quite achieved that financial stability you hope you will already have when you begin caring for elders whose insurance won’t cover in-home “non-medical” care. And that is the real tragedy of having a parent with dementia, or any sick parent who also requires this so-called “non-medical” care, especially when you are the only child, and so you are the one with Power of Attorney.
Unfortunately, once you have spent three years as a young caregiver and your family’s money has dwindled away and you are suddenly 29, it is terribly difficult to explain certain time-gaps in your résumé to would-be employers. Of course I am pleased to now have a job that allows me to surreptitiously travel in times of crisis, and I am also pleased to have a job at all. I am especially fortunate because, not only do I enjoy writing, it very literally pays my bills. That is a dream come true.
I am telling you this, hopefully not to annoy you, but just to tell you. And I wish my poverty were exceptional, I really do. But I live in a city. I live in a very large, expensive, and competitive city (which, yes, might have been a mistake on my part, that’s fair). Until last month, I did not have health insurance. Perhaps if you saw me in my shabby clothes in my shabby neighborhood, you would assume the worst. But I graduated from Northwestern with a fiction writing degree, with honors—I genuinely couldn’t have anticipated this degree’s uselessness—and I have made the most money in my life probably packing and shipping boxes. The last new person I met was a University of Chicago grad, a useless history major, one who used to lift boxes, and now he is poor. You can understand why I felt for him. Another close friend in the service industry is also depressingly poor, and she was a Rhodes Scholar. Her boss at the restaurant once encouraged me to “go ahead and get a Masters, and come see me for a job after.” Then he laughed and told me that he was my future. He is not. He has a wife and child, and he moved to Chicago from England to be an artist, and he works so hard. He is not my future. I can tell you, somewhat bitterly, I do not have a child in my future, and I will probably never have the money to try to make one.
I cannot be made to believe that a dearth of education and a proliferation of “handouts” are causally related. I cannot be told that my “five illegitimate children” are causally related to my poverty. Then again, you probably cannot guess my politics, because my politics are based mostly on matters of good ol’ American pride: for my own part, I have never accepted a handout or unemployment or anything federally burdensome, and I have never occupied Wall Street because my parents worked hard and eventually owned a home without any threat of debt. And yet—well, you can imagine how things could have been different. Maybe harder times might have changed my politics.
Yes, I have heard the case before that poor people are more likely to have tons of babies and be on drugs. This idea about poor people and drugs is maybe the most offensive thing I have ever heard. I have read this before, yet I haven’t seen any reliable, empirical evidence to support that claim. I am certainly not on drugs (unless you count smoking, which is a great way to cut down on the cost of food, unhappily). From purely experiential evidence, however, none of my smart, poor-people friends are on drugs, or else we wouldn’t quite make rent, see. Maybe we would be on drugs, but who has the money! We are all too busy being on cigarettes and frozen pizza and possibly powdered milk.
Perhaps a couple of my smart, poor-people friends now have children—so your guesses were right all along!—and I am torn between a financial sadness for them and an emotional grief for me. But I am the “under-earning woman” you named above, the one who ought to be forcibly sterilized (as if it would make some difference) and checked for drug abuse (OK), the poor person who, as you said, contributes to a cycle of “violence” and “crime,” who bought ten fifty-cent bricks of ramen last night and has no sense of “fiscal responsibility.”
No, I know! I am writing a really overblown response to you in the comments of a post about the freaking Duggars!
But it is painful for me to see a fleeting remark about “hey, should a family really have 20 children” turned into a matter of class warfare. Obviously, the number of children a family can have is not necessarily connected to poorness, because Michelle Duggar can have 20 of them, and I can have none. Obviously it is not about race and class, because she is upper-middle-class or better, and I am not, and we are all white. Obviously it is not about education, which I will resentfully tell you has little anymore to do with class or employment, which you will discover for yourself if you speak to enough people in any large city.
You are certainly free to claim that my circumstances have made me into an exception, but I am the exception that proves the stupidity of these “rules.” And I am so sorry that I sound so entitled when I tell you about my own experiences, because these perceived hindrances are so antithetical to living the American dream, I know, which is all about industry and education and bootstraps. I do know, because my immigrant Austrian/Czechoslovakian adoptive father and his young bride who worked in a factory did all those things we like to sing about.
However, however: when one person is yelling about “the system” and how it is wrong, I feel very obligated to absolutely agree with him-or-her and, therefore, to tell him-or-her not only where the “cracks in the system” are, but also a little bit about the people who have fallen through them.
Damn. I love this.
Your Northwestern education is blatantly obvious from your eloquent writing style. MULTIPLE EXCLAMATION POINTS.
First off, I love Chicago and also live here in a shit hole apartment…never blame yourself for living in a city that is this amazeballs.
My immigrant parents had 6 kids and my dad was a welder and mom was stay at home. We never went on public assistance but were “poor” in that we could not afford school supplies, had free lunch, sparingly bought clothes from resale shops, etc. I do not like to think of myself as having a poor childhood because I had a great family regardless of financial stability. So I too understand what it means to be “poor” in the traditional sense. None of us do drugs and/or are gangbangers. We have lawyer, doctor, pharmaceutical manager and 3 college students.
The discussion on the Duggars became adversarial because people’s hatred toward the family is simply rooted in the fact that they have 19…well, will have 20 kids. And while there is freedom to say what you want on the interwebz, people can’t expect their comments not to get responded to.
However it is *impossible* to deny the situation with welfare in this country. While it is true that poor people like us grow up to be successful and educated, one cannot deny the adverse effects of having multiple children in those situations.
I see criminal defendants being heralded into bond court on 26th and California, one after another, for drug crimes and/or violent offenses. Offered as a mitigating factor for bond/bail purposes: “I have 5 kids, judge.” “I have 9 kids, judge.” “I’m 3 people’s baby daddy, judge.” Why? Why do these people recklessly reproduce, bringing life into the terrible circumstances in which the parents themselves live, perpetuate and do nothing to change? Yes, it is difficult to come from a broken home and make something of yourself. The key to that is simply breaking the cycle. I don’t buy the minority bullshit excuse, as in black people have a harder time going to college of getting money for college. Newsflash, affirmative action is practiced at every level of secondary education and scholarships up the ass for any minority who wishes to apply and is admitted.
My dad passed away last year, I’m about $200,000.00 in debt and have an extremely low paying job for my qualifications (about $30,000.00). I give thousands of dollars to my mom every year to help her with finances. Yes, it sucks. It sucks not to be rich in a city where money begs to be spent. But you can take steps to try to put yourself into a better situation. Government assistance is not the way to do it, and you don’t have a “right” to have babies and have the government pay for it.
Forcing birth control and drug testing on welfare applicants and recipients is simply a policy change that would benefit everyone involved. You do not have a right to welfare, so the government can make restrictions on receiving it which do not violate your other basic civil rights. A measure like the birth control one will *never* pass, given the situation in the United States right now, so you probably don’t have to worry about that getting passed. It certainly would help the country in more ways than one, but AH WHATTYA GONNA DO.
Anyway thanks for responding – u haz da smartz.
LegalEase,
Thank you, first, for your kind words, and second, for responding! It sounds as if we had simultaneous upbringings in many ways. Then again, I do worry that you and I might not have a great deal left to argue, which makes me a little sad. We may have to disagree and shake on it. (But I am longwinded, and I am having fun, so you can bet I’ll keep typing anyway!)
Some things, like your contention about affirmative action, we maybe naturally can’t agree on (although to be fair, I do recognize that you recognize your difficult upbringing as being a sort of exception to, again, a “stupid rule,” and so I understand your stance; also, when my mother did work, she was a damned fine high school guidance counselor, so I could argue either side till I’m out of breath). I do have to agree with you on one thing, though. As a person who earns, well, substantially less than you do—but, er, OK, this is not a helpful pissing contest—Chicago is the best city, maybe the most hardworking city, and it is an expensive city. (Though not the most expensive, argh!, which is a huge part of why I moved back here!) But certainly we all must make our way. That, we can agree on.
Here’s something. I have heard that, while my adoptive father was alive, I ought to have pursued a caregiving grant—I don’t know whether you followed the link about caregiving, but my own work, in part, helped to save the health care industry 257 billion dollars each year which, hey, with my longstanding, outstanding ER bills, why did I even do that. But if I had enjoyed such a grant, I’m not sure how it might have squared with your beliefs about the privilege of “government assistance.” Do you know the answer? (This is a genuine question, although admittedly it may be getting into some nitty-gritty.)
Moreover, I am a little nervous to tell you that for one short month in 2009, a friendly acquaintance used his Link Card to buy me shampoo—I think this might be illegal. And to speak out-of-turn for all the other months, many of my friends use Link Cards, also, to eat. But now I am describing young people who somehow found ways to spend upwards of $30k for four years or more—this is an “investment” in an “education”—only to go on to earn about $10k-ish annually, hopefully more, and sometimes less. That is literally the poverty line in Chicago and, I shudder to tell you, these impoverisheds are the people I spend a lot of time with. They do not tend to be politically active, I have also discovered, because they are too busy trying to eat. If I were to ask any of my Chicago friends what they think of the Duggars’ 20th baby, they could not even begin to form an opinion, because they do not have cable.
I should add, too, I am not arguing that poor people can grow up to be “successful” and “educated,” if only because, again, there is barely any link between “money,” “success,” and “education” at all anymore. We live in a strange time where one value does not commiserate with the next, where hardly any educated people I know could also be called “successful,” regardless of their families’ “starting points.” What I’m saying is, while I endured a very terrible experience, many others my age are in similar straits and didn’t. Imagine later on, please, when we all have elderly parents to watch over. If we are this poor now, what will we do then?
And this is a terribly frightening proposition, a potentially frightening existence where, instead of finding new ways to “break” cycles, terrible cycles of new poverty are only beginning for the first time. These kids have no idea what to do, and it all has scarcely anything to do with mortgages or anything. And I know we are in agreement here at least somewhat, because you have alluded to your earning power as not matching your real salary anymore. And the terrible truth is, my friend the Rhodes Scholar waitress will likely never have any “earning power,” ever, no matter whether she moves to a smaller town. This has less to do with her work ethic—which may well outmatch anyone I know—and more to do with the precise instant she graduated college, when she first became a waitress, which was a terrible instant when a jillion other literate future waitresses also graduated.
And all this that I’m typing has nothing to do with “welfare” “babies” anymore, and I’m sorry, and my point has absolutely spiraled out of control. I just feel it is so important to perhaps discuss the kinds of people—who are still practically children, just standing around without health insurance, kind of dying!—who encompass a huge part of the new face of poverty, who, when we say things like “let’s make birth control mandatory” or “let’s test for drugs,” you really do mean these people also. You do. These people aren’t even the children of immigrants, aren’t “benefiting” from “affirmative action,” but they are suffering, because instead of being born into debt or poverty as in the old days, they are now only collecting it, believing they will graduate college with the upper hand in the workforce. And these are educated people moving directly into a world of hard labor: in some ways, these are kind of the new immigrants too, because they are ’emigrating’ from private universities into a much different, unfamiliar country, and they have such high stupid hopes. (I am not an economist, and you are free to disagree, but I have read that the economy and the job market are two wholly separate entities, with hardly any Venn overlap. Scary.)
You can think as you like about all the other people who have been caught in dire straights—I can’t necessarily argue you out of believing that some people have caused the spread of crime, violence, or drugs, because that is what you decided much earlier, so we cannot even begin to discuss what we as a society “owe” others, at least not in that way—but again, I think it might be necessary to revisit the idea that poverty lives in our backyard, that it looks uncannily like both of us, and that hard work together with a great education do not make poverty axiomatically escapable.
Thank you again for all the thoughtful conversation, and wishing you all best,
–j
Yes, I have heard the case before that poor people are more likely to have tons of babies and be on drugs. This idea about poor people and drugs is maybe the most offensive thing I have ever heard.
In response to the above, you shouldn’t necessarily take this personally. Should you actually desire statistics, I can find them for you. It is typically known that there is a very high correlation between being poor and being under-educated (not graduating from high school or having an equivalent), abusing drugs, and having multiple children.
It is one of those stereotypes that exists for a reason. Like most stereotypes, it is based on the first-hand assumptions of multiple people and propagated by those who are fit themselves into said stereotypes. It will not be a solid 1.0 correlation, and it will not be true of everyone, but there you have it.
It comes down to what people think constitutes their civil rights.
Should your parents have had children when they were not able to financially, emotionally, and psychologically support you?
No.
Is it fair then to say that you should never have been born?
Of course not.
It is a tricky situation.
In all honesty, I believe that *everyone* should be forcefully sterilized at birth with the procedure being undone only after some sort of proof that they can responsibly raise the child/children. Who would determine what is fair? Who knows. And does it even matter? No, because it will never happen.
With no easy answers, or answers that won’t piss a few people off, it’s hard to say if the Duggars are in the right in having their 20 children. I feel that they are if they are able to provide for each and every one of them.
u know Bach had 20 kids & he was a genius.
-g
As the Florida experiment has clearly shown us, the welfare program is just CHOCK FULL of drug users. OH WAIT.
i really really like you, jenn
OMG its not a surprise that they are breeding again, its greed concealed by cuteness. Its a sick sad thing, so many kids need adopted but yet rather than save a life they make another baby cause an adopted baby won’t help their show. America is getting over her and her kids so the show will die this season we can only hope
The Duggars are a CULT and for those of you whining about “welfare queens” and the taxpayers, and answer me this: how many people get a TV show about their cult and then get to deduct some $200, 000 of their income for the continued, optional, sick procreation they parade in front of the world?
Michelle,thank you for showing how children should be raised.your never to old to have childrenif god is in control. Think of how old the ladies were in the bilble when God blessed them with children. God bless you and your family and thank you for shareing
How is it that you were ever even able to READ the Bible? Given your amount of literacy, I have to assume you used the picture-book version, so it is no surprise whatsoever that you have the opinion that you do.
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