A century and a half ago P.T. Barnum would have figured out a way to make the Duggars a sideshow in his circus. Or at least Michelle Duggar: "Meet the amazing woman who just can't stop bearing children!!"But in essence, they've already done that to their family and in this day and age, being a sideshow, ahem, I mean a celebrated family, can be very lucrative. They can afford to propagate.
More kids! More kids! Don't Abort! Seriously, Bryan Fischer and Tony Perkins (to name a few) are getting frightfully demented with their hypocrisy. Can you imagine how the Duggars would be treated if they were black and on food stamps? Perkins would have advocated forcibly tying Michelle's tubes at least 10 kids ago as well as questioning the "morality" of the parents for introducing the children to welfare and poverty.
Quiverfull is also promoting sterilization reversal surgery. As yet it hasn't purchased fertility drugs en masse, but give it time.
Critics of Quiverfull add one more flaw in the crank 'em out movement:
The most famous victim of Quiverfull's proselytizing has been Andrea Yates, the Houston housewife who drowned her five children in a bathtub on June 20, 2001.
Cheryl Lindsey Seelhoff, a former ardent Quiverfull adherent, birth-mother of eleven children, and former editor of Gentle Spirit Magazine, argues that the Quiverfull movement is one "in which women and children are routinely and systematically subordinated and subjugated by the men in their lives - fathers, husbands, older sons,. . .pastors, elders, leaders - as a matter of biblical principle." Seelhoff charges that Quiverful adherents "never talk about the victims of the movement, other than to distance themselves, to explain how it is that the victims are aberrations."
From the Dionne Quintuplets to Octomom, extreme fertility will always be a headliner, but the topic has never really had political implications. Until now.Her first psychiatrist, Dr. Eileen Starbranch, warned Yates and her husband against having more children, stating in Yates's medical record two days later, '"Apparently patient and husband plan to have as many babies as nature will allow! This will surely guarantee future psychotic depression."
The Duggars are slated to headline Tony Perkins' Values Voter Summit
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