Eighteen Kids Make a Quiverfull

A woman in Arkansas, Michelle Duggar, is expecting her eighteenth child, according to an AP story that was reported today. And she's delighted about it. The tone of the press coverage is just as chirpy as the mother-to-be herself:

It's a happy Mother's Day for an Arkansas woman — she's pregnant with her 18th child. Michelle Duggar, 41, is due on New Year's Day, and the latest addition will join seven sisters and 10 brothers. There are two sets of twins.

"We've had three in January, three in December. Those two months are a busy time for us," she said, laughing.

The Duggars' oldest child, Josh, is 20, and the youngest, Jennifer, is nine months old.

The fast-growing family lives in Tontitown in northwest Arkansas in a 7,000-square-foot home. All the children — whose names start with the letter J — are home-schooled.

Duggar has been been pregnant for more than 11 years of her life, and the family is in the process of filming another series for Discovery Health.
(Source: AP via Yahoo)

I realize it may sound Grinch-like to grouse about another woman's pregnancy. I'm willing to take her joy at face value; I'm also willing to grant that reproductive rights has to include the right to make childbearing decisions that I personally find incomprehensible.

But there's a darker side to the Duggar megafamily, one that's not much covered in the media. The only trace of it in the AP article is a single sentence:

She and her husband, Jim Bob Duggar, said they'll keep having children as long as God wills it.

This is a phrase we've heard before. Remember the Andrea Yates case, where a Texas woman suffering from postpartum psychosis drowned all five of her children in the bathtub? She and her husband, too, transferred all of their moral agency to "God's will," even after previous pregnancies had obviously made Ms. Yates mentally ill.

I'm not suggesting that Ms. Duggar is going to snap under the strain - not at all. (In fact, with a highly regimented system for enlisting the children in household work, her life is immeasurably more organized than my own. Not that I'd want to trade.) But there's a huge element of coercion in these fundamentalist communities that insist women forego birth control and turn their bodies over to God (and their husbands).

This is how the Duggars themselves describe their decision to accept as many children as their God will give them:

Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar married July 21st, 1984. At that time, they chose to use the birth control pill. They thought, “We don’t want children right now. We can’t afford them. We want children in our timing, when we’re ready.” Four years later they decided to have their first child. Then, Michelle went back on the pill, but she conceived and had a miscarriage. At that point they talked with a Christian medical doctor and read the fine print in the contraceptives package. They found that while taking the pill you can get pregnant and then miscarry. They were grieved! They were Christians! They were pro-life! They realized that their selfish actions had taken the life of their child.

They teach their kids creationism in their homeschooling, so the weird science in this passage is no shocker. They're parroting the idea that the pill is an abortifacient, which is simply not supported by any real, non-wingnut science. It is, however, at the heart of the anti-abortion movement's campaign to make hormonal birth control inaccessible (by convincing pharmacists not to fill prescriptions) and ultimately illegal.

Here's the rest of the story that's not being told by the media: Religiously, the Duggars are fundamentalist Baptists who - according to Wikipedia - support the Quiverfull movement. As journalist Kathryn Joyce reported in The Nation in late 2006, the Quiverfull movement demands wives be subservient to their husbands and bear as many children as possible to be "arrows" in a holy war against liberalism. Their bodies, Joyce writes, are to be a "living sacrifice" to God. The goal is to out-reproduce those of us who don't share their beliefs in an attempt to promote God's kingdom on earth, or at least their version of it. (Read Joyce's article; it's wonderfully reported, albeit chilling.)

Why do women go along with this pseudo-theology? I don't believe fundamentalist women - even those involved in such obviously anti-feminist movements as Quiverfull - are mere dupes. Just because a wife pledges subservience doesn't mean she's powerless. Quiverfull women, like Michelle Duggar, homeschool their children. For me, that would be a quick ticket to the loony bin. For Quiverfull women, I suspect it can be a source of power and satisfaction. Similarly, these women can build an identity around being crucial to building an army for God. Quiverfull elevates the status of motherhood, making it not just "the most important job in the world" (as the tired cliché would have it) but a holy mission. If you're already drawn toward having a large family anyway, what quicker route to fulfillment and meaning?

Another clue to the power Quiverfull women (and fundamentalist wives more generally) wield in mothering comes from the Duggar family's own website. It refers to "training" children and a "desire to train up their children to follow God with their whole heart." This is not-exactly-veiled code for an authoritarian approach to discipline that some fundamentalist Christians embrace. Two of its main exponents, Michael and Debi Pearl, describe it as geared toward producing perfect obedience:

"Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it (Prov. 22:6)." Train up, not beat up. Train up, not discipline up. Train up, not educate up. Train up, not "positive affirmation" up. Training is the most obvious missing element in child rearing. Training is not discipline. A child will need more than "obedience training," but without it everything else will be insufficient. ...

There is much satisfaction in training up a child. It is easy and challenging. When my children were able to crawl (in the case of one, roll) around the room, I set up training sessions.

Try it yourself. Place an appealing object where they can reach it, maybe in a "No-no" corner or on an apple juice table (That's where the coffee table once sat). When they spy it and make a dive for it, in a calm voice say, "No, don't touch it." They will already be familiar with the "No," so they will pause, look at you in wonder and then turn around and grab it. Switch their hand once and simultaneously say, "No." Remember, you are not disciplining, you are training. One spat with a little switch is enough. They will again pull back their hand and consider the relationship between the object, their desire, the command and the little reinforcing pain.
(From Michael and Debi Pearl, "To Train up a Child")

Imagine deliberately setting up situations where an infant will be hit with a switch. An infant who's just learned to crawl! My Bear started that at six months! Even that exemplar of Christian authoritarianism, James Dobson, says: "There is no excuse for spanking babies or children younger than 15 to 18 months of age."

You could say many things about the parent in this vignette - that she (or he) is an incredible control freak, that she is indulging in cruelty. The one thing you can't say is that the parent is powerless. And therein, too, must lie some of the appeal for women who voluntarily sign up for fundamentalist family life. (I'm not thinking here at all of sects like the FLDS, where women have very little choice.)

But do you hear about any of this in the media version of the Duggar's story? No! Instead, the coverage emphasizes the quaintness, or cuteness, or sheer unusualness of the Duggars having (almost) 18 children. The website for the Discovery Channel show has fun games like "Name that Duggar!" But you scarcely hear a peep about the Quiverfull movement, its goals, its call for female subservience, or its adherents' medieval approach to child rearing - I mean, training.

Update, 11:20 p.m., May 10: Please check out the first comment for a fascinating inside perspective from a Quiverfull mother who practices attachment parenting and rejects the notion of wifely subservience. I'm glad to know that the movement is not monolithic and that there are some strong and assertive women in it. Thank you, Betsy, for your remarks.