quote: ...according to a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in June, babies born at 25 weeks who receive aggressive treatment through intensive care have an 82 percent chance of survival.
That's pretty good odds. Here's hoping.
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Yeah, probably not. I think her view is that if the child survives, she's meant to have it, and if not, not. No reason not to see whether she's meant to have more, in that frame.
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I think that is an overly harsh characterization of her. This is a woman who decided to give up birth control after a miscarriage scarred her. I am pretty sure she is not taking the potential death of her children lightly. I think she is someone who, for better or worse, has decided to trust that her God will watch over her and do what is best for her and her family in the long run even if it brings her terrible short term pain. You make her sound much more callous than I think her motives are even if I'm not sure a family her size is a great plan.
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I don;t think that is a harsh opinion of her at all...I have heard her say almost those exact words when asked to explain her beliefs on birth control and the dangers of having so many children.
I don't think it is callous, though.
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quote:Originally posted by theresa51282: I think that is an overly harsh characterization of her. This is a woman who decided to give up birth control after a miscarriage scarred her. I am pretty sure she is not taking the potential death of her children lightly. I think she is someone who, for better or worse, has decided to trust that her God will watch over her and do what is best for her and her family in the long run even if it brings her terrible short term pain. You make her sound much more callous than I think her motives are even if I'm not sure a family her size is a great plan.
I don't think she's callous. I think she's obsessive and naïve.
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quote:Originally posted by theresa51282: I think that is an overly harsh characterization of her. This is a woman who decided to give up birth control after a miscarriage scarred her. I am pretty sure she is not taking the potential death of her children lightly. I think she is someone who, for better or worse, has decided to trust that her God will watch over her and do what is best for her and her family in the long run even if it brings her terrible short term pain. You make her sound much more callous than I think her motives are even if I'm not sure a family her size is a great plan.
No, I think people are being very charitable by not talking about this woman using the births of 19 children to promote herself and her religious lifestyle in the public eye. That the continued attempts to have more children could actually cause the family a great deal of emotional suffering is a consequence of that decision- whether you believe my ascribed motivation or not.
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She had pre-e. That can happen to any pregnant woman. However once you've had it it's more likely to happen again. They've always said that if it becomes dangerous to her they will stop. I don't know what they'll decide now but I'm sure it may be time to stop soon even if they have one more. And this baby was born closer to 26 weeks than 25. I think that whatever happens to this baby, she will have the best life they can give her, and that's all I hope for from any parents.
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I read it was Hellp and not just pre-e. Which scares me even more since the only case of that I know of in person, turned out tragically.
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Oh, by all means let the childless single people think the very worst of people who dedicate their lives to raising children. Clearly its the people whose lives are all about themselves who know best how to dedicate their lives to little someone elses.
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I'm not exactly old enough to have started a family, so let's not go too far with your liberal elitist fantasy, please. Your scorn for the childless doesn't change the fact that 19 children is too many- and it certainly doesn't change my opinion.
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theresa, I'm sorry if it sounded harsh. While I think the Duggars been very lucky to be able to support such a large group, they are quite the model of how to make a ginormous family work well. They're impressive people.
I do think that if you take the view that you're going to have as many children as you can (even with a limit such as stopping when it becomes dangerous for the mother), a miscarriage or the death of a newborn doesn't mean you should stop, though. That's all I was trying to say.
(Unless she's beat the odds significantly, she must have had a dozen or so miscarriages already.)
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quote:Originally posted by scifibum: (Unless she's beat the odds significantly, she must have had a dozen or so miscarriages already.)
The odds are about 1 in 5. By my count, that would most likely be 3-6. And we know about at least one, which they have talked about.
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quote:Originally posted by katharina: Oh, by all means let the childless single people think the very worst of people who dedicate their lives to raising children. Clearly its the people whose lives are all about themselves who know best how to dedicate their lives to little someone elses.
That's rather callous stereotyping. I know quite a few childless people whose lives are all about serving other people and several very self centered parents.
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quote:Originally posted by scifibum: While I think the Duggars been very lucky to be able to support such a large group, they are quite the model of how to make a ginormous family work well. They're impressive people.
I have to disagree. Making your children a public spectacle on reality TV is exploitation. Even if I approved of everything else they did, that one simple fact makes them anything but a model family.
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quote:Originally posted by Orincoro: No, I think people are being very charitable by not talking about this woman using the births of 19 children to promote herself and her religious lifestyle in the public eye.
Being charitable is, I think, an appropriate response to parents in this situation and does not have to indicate an endorsement of their choices.
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quote:Originally posted by scifibum: (Unless she's beat the odds significantly, she must have had a dozen or so miscarriages already.)
The odds are about 1 in 5. By my count, that would most likely be 3-6. And we know about at least one, which they have talked about.
The odds of miscarriage are kind of misleading because its not random. Some women have a much higher tendency to miscarry than others. Given that she's had 19 live births in 21 years, she really hasn't had time for a statistically average number of miscarriages.
In looking for the ages of the Duggar children, I noted that 3 of her last 5 children were born by C-section. She's 43, had pre-eclampsia, at least 20 pregnancies and at least 3 C-sections. For her sake, I really hope they decide its time to stop. It really isn't remotely safe for her to have more children.
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quote:Originally posted by The Rabbit: The odds of miscarriage are kind of misleading because its not random. Some women have a much higher tendency to miscarry than others.
While the latter is certainly true, many miscarriages (IIRC, my doctor's statistic was 1/2-2/3 of miscarriages, but I don't know what she was basing that on) are random, as far as medical science thus far has been able to determine. Blighted ova, certain genetic or developmental abnormalities, and some other causes do seem to strike fairly randomly. Other issues -- uterine or other structural abnormalities, maternal health, genetic incompatibility between the partners, are less random, of course.
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quote:Originally posted by Orincoro: No, I think people are being very charitable by not talking about this woman using the births of 19 children to promote herself and her religious lifestyle in the public eye.
Being charitable is, I think, an appropriate response to parents in this situation and does not have to indicate an endorsement of their choices.
posted
18 pregnancies, not 20, two sets of twins, one discussed miscarriage after Josh but before the first twins.
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quote:Originally posted by breyerchic04: 18 pregnancies, not 20, two sets of twins, one discussed miscarriage after Josh but before the first twins.
Thanks for the correction. It still doesn't leave much room for miscarriages.
I'm not anti-big family. I come from a family with 7 children and lived in a community where that wasn't considered unusually large. I know quite a few families with 10 or more children and they didn't seem to be any more trouble prone than families with two or three kids. None of the families I've known with 10+ children even seemed to be leading some sort of fringe lifestyle. The kids were involved in sports, music, theatre, generally very social, well groomed "normal kids". Most of them have gone to college, some to graduate schools and seem to be leading normal happy successful lives. Some of them have chosen to have big families, some have not.
But for some reason, something about the Duggars creeps me out. Putting their children on reality TV is exploitive and their efforts at promoting the enormous family lifestyle seem over the top excessive, even to someone who is completely comfortable with big families. Maybe its that I'm just not comfortable having them become the defacto stereotype for big families since they seem to me to be so much further on the cultural fringe than the big families I've known.
That said, I do wish them and their tiny new child the best.
[ December 19, 2009, 02:18 PM: Message edited by: The Rabbit ]
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quote:Originally posted by scifibum: (Unless she's beat the odds significantly, she must have had a dozen or so miscarriages already.)
The odds are about 1 in 5. By my count, that would most likely be 3-6. And we know about at least one, which they have talked about.
My understanding is that the rate of miscarriage after implantation is more like 1 in 3. However, many times the miscarriage happens before people are aware of a pregnancy (and may never be aware). If she's had 19 kids, and they are 70% of the implanted embryos, then I guess the likely figure is closer to 8 than a dozen.
Now I'm feeling creepy for speculating about it, but I let my desire to clarify outweigh enough to post this.
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quote:My understanding is that the rate of miscarriage after implantation is more like 1 in 3.
I have some general skepticism about that number. If I remember carefully, it comes from very careful monitoring of women who are having difficulty conceiving a child. The sampling bias in that is unbelievable. There is every reason to believe that women who are having difficulty conceiving a child are abnormally likely to miscarry in the first few weeks. That alone would explain why they are having the difficulty in the first place.
Extending those results to normally fertile women is simply unjustified and extending them to extraordinarily fertile women, like Mrs. Duggar, is way out.
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quote:Being charitable is, I think, an appropriate response to parents in this situation and does not have to indicate an endorsement of their choices.
Heck yes. I know we don't see eye to eye on most things, but this?
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Hasn't anyone explained to this family that it may be unhealthy, both for the mother and the new child to get pregnant again so quickly after giving birth? It was my understanding that most doctors think that you should wait at least 18 months to get pregnant after giving birth. If she's had 18 pregnancies in 20 years she has spent the majority of the last 20 years pregnant. It can't be healthy. Even in animal husbandry, ethical breeders wait a period of time between pregnancies to ensure the health of their animals.
If we assume a pregnancy of exactly nine months and factor in 17 successful pregnancies (not counting the miscarriage) that's approximately 153 months of pregnancy which equals about 12.75 years of pregnancy. She's only 43 which means she has spent 1/4 of her life pregnant. It can't be healthy. And she's now old enough (as brought up by several people) to have to worry about age related birth defects.
I hope that this new baby is healthy, but it's time to seriously consider some form of birth control. If the pill and other chemical controllers are out, then condoms or the rhythm method. But for her own health, they should really consider stopping.
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quote:Hasn't anyone explained to this family that it may be unhealthy, both for the mother and the new child to get pregnant again so quickly after giving birth? It was my understanding that most doctors think that you should wait at least 18 months to get pregnant after giving birth.
I'm sure they are not ignorant of the risks. There is so much variability between individual women that it is unwise to apply some doctors rule of thumb to a specific person without a much more detailed knowledge than any of us have.
Mrs. Duggar is clearly an unusual woman. Even in back in the days when abstinence was the only common form of birth control, very few women had that many successful pregnancies.
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I'm sorry if someone already mentioned this, but anyway:
While I disagree with this kind of serial breeding, for reasons others have already well articulated, there might be one positive side to the life of this family. It might also be a reason why they might seem happy with their lives:
They have a large pack with strong, intimate emotional ties.
Not just a pack of 4 people, which is what people usually have, and which is likely too small for a human. A pack of 21 people is probably pretty close to the size of the packs humans have traditionally had, and from an evolutionary and biological standpoint it might feel more emotionally rewarding. It's close to the size of packs (either villages or nomad groups) in tribal cultures. In my understanding it's close to the size of packs we had when we were still hunter-gatherers. And biologically, we are not that different from that age.
Personally I think that a lack of proper pack with strong, positive emotional ties is one of the main reasons why a lot of people in modern societies feel emotionally dysfunctional, and lonely.
This doesn't mean that people should start forming big families to have their own pack, as there are many other, mora practical ways to build one. And a large family can also be very dysfunctional as a pack.
But I just thought this was something interesting to point out.
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quote:Originally posted by andi330: It was my understanding that most doctors think that you should wait at least 18 months to get pregnant after giving birth.
Most? Really? A 21 month seperation between the first two kids is pretty common, which means getting pregnant again when the first is a year old.
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dkw, I'm not sure what "most" recommend, but just because people do it doesn't mean it's healthy. After all, people smoke and eat at McDonalds, and both of those have been proven to be unhealthy!
While I don't know what "most" doctors recommend, I have heard that it's a bad idea to nurse while you're pregnant (though extended breast feeders claim it's not really bad). I'm pretty sure Mrs. Duggar is breaking this rule too.
Besides, even if it's perfectly safe to do 21 months between pregnancies for two or three pregnancies in a row, doing it 15 or 16 times is quite different. Even if she is the perfect breeding stock human, eventually this has to become unsafe. While normally I would say, "It's her life, if she wants to put it at jeopardy, it's none of my business." However, if this preemie isn't a one time event, and if she starts to have successive pregnancies that end in preterm births, then it is no longer only her health she is putting at risk. She's risking helpless infants, and at that point I begin to think it's morally questionable. So far, though, we have no evidence that she will get pregnant again. I believe (or at least hope) that for right now their attention will be focused on the children they already have, especially the one that is in so much danger right now.
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quote:Originally posted by DDDaysh: While I don't know what "most" doctors recommend, I have heard that it's a bad idea to nurse while you're pregnant (though extended breast feeders claim it's not really bad). I'm pretty sure Mrs. Duggar is breaking this rule too.
Whose rule is that, exactly?
eta: I've done a lot of reading on that topic, and there are no studies that show increased risk to an otherwise healthy mother and baby from breastfeeding during pregnancy. The only time there is a medical reason to wean is if the mother is on "pelvic rest" because of increased chance of miscarriage/pre-term labor.
eata: Lots of women do chose to wean when they get pregnant, and lots of babies self-wean either becasue supply dips or the taste changes, but that's personal preference, not a "rule."
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quote: Lots of women do chose to wean when they get pregnant, and lots of babies self-wean either becasue supply dips or the taste changes, but that's personal preference, not a "rule."
Additionally, some women do not ovulate while they are breast feeding and some women stop producing milk when they become pregnant. But in both cases, that is only SOME women. Many women have no difficulty conceiving while breast feeding and no difficulties breast feeding while pregnant.
I expect, that if a woman is both pregnant and breast feeding she would need to be quite careful to be sure she was getting enough nutrition, but that should be perfectly doable for most women.
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quote:My understanding is that the rate of miscarriage after implantation is more like 1 in 3.
I have some general skepticism about that number. If I remember carefully, it comes from very careful monitoring of women who are having difficulty conceiving a child. The sampling bias in that is unbelievable. There is every reason to believe that women who are having difficulty conceiving a child are abnormally likely to miscarry in the first few weeks. That alone would explain why they are having the difficulty in the first place.
Extending those results to normally fertile women is simply unjustified and extending them to extraordinarily fertile women, like Mrs. Duggar, is way out.
Completely agree.
Also agree with Rabbit and dkw on nursing while pregnant. And while spacing pregnancies 12 months apart is often recommended (and I have heard longer times suggested as well), I am unaware of any studies indicating that for otherwise healthy women closer-spaced pregnancies are necessarily unhealthy. As Rabbit said, the key is to be sure the mother is getting adequate nutrition.
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quote:Originally posted by katharina: Oh, by all means let the childless single people think the very worst of people who dedicate their lives to raising children.
sure, that's exactly what's going on here.
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quote:Originally posted by Tuukka: But I just thought this was something interesting to point out.
I want to add something to this observation, and in this case it's going to be a non-judgmental interpretation, kind of "Duggars as anthropological case study" style. I'm not saying any of these things are good or bad. I'm simply observing that they are.
In the case of this family, the need for a self-bred pack is extraordinarily large, since them and the rest of their Gothardite, inclusivist community is very small and very self-secluded from the world at large. Aside from the business interactions which the males (and ONLY the males) are being groomed for, the family is being rigidly defended from exposure and 'contamination' to society. It is actually a persevering means by which they maintain an inter-generational transmission of mores.
These isolated packs of children are what essentially amount to cultural 'sibkos,' shielded from outside corruption for the defense of moral purity, and thus allows this fascinating moral culture to at least maintain its numbers.
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They haven't put any updates about it on their web site so I truly pray all is going well with mama and baby..
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Yeah so I'm gonna necro this thread up again after half a decade or so.
This thread was the one that inspired me to really look into Gothardites, Quiverfull, purity values, courtship, the Family Research Council, all of that and how extraordinarily and fully creepy and actually frankly disturbing the values and practices of the Duggars truly were.
But I guess I couldn't have possibly guessed just how this was all going to turn out. Well, I mean, I could have, apparently, according to ex-Quiverfull who document the movement's propensity towards equipping sexual molestation, abuse, and rape of women and girls.
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Duggars follow Gothardite quiverfull movement. Gothard produced publications and teachings which were big on basically blaming women and girls for being abused, and encouraging families to keep it hidden and secret and the abusers could blame it on women being immodest, and the women and community were to forgive the abusers and move on.
Appropriately, Gothard was a serial molester/rapist who probably had upwards of 80 victims. Resigns because of being horrible molester/rapist.
Doug Phillips of Vision Forum Ministries, apparently a very or most important leader of the Duggars' sect/following/whatever, awarded Michelle their "mother of the year" award and is now in court for sexually assaulting a woman he claims was his mistress, while she attests that it was actually abuse and molestation.
The policeman who patriarch Jim Bob eventually took Josh Duggar to report the crime just gave Josh a 'stern talking to' and then covered it all up for them. That policeman is now in jail for child pornography serving a 56 year sentence.
The founder of the 'treatment center' that Josh Duggar reported to for ministry-approved rehabilitation left that center after getting caught sexually grooming teens and young women.
A judge who was appointed by Huckabee, a big supporter of the Duggar family, ordered the case file on Josh to be destroyed. This despite similar records being kept indefinitely.
Last year, the Duggar matriarch recorded a robocall warning voters of Fayetteville, Arkansas, against a bill that would allow trans women to use the women’s bathroom.
A judge who was appointed by Huckabee, a big supporter of the Duggar family, ordered the case file to be destroyed. Despite similar records being kept indefinitely. Ostensibly, it was done in order to protect the identity of the victims.
It just does not stop. The whole movement is just exploding in filth centered around a show that was their largest stage for providing them an opportunity to pitch a sanitized, idealized version of their disgusting values.
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Something on common with the sex abuse facilitation among Catholic clergy is the notion of dealing with the abuse as a sin rather than a crime when in reality it is both. Another lapse is forgiveness does not mean avoidance of consequences. Apology is hollow without atonement.
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Cue the 'no way we could have known', I wonder, from people who objected to the term 'creepy'?
I thought it was creepy as hell when I first heard of it, which by the way was no less valid an opinion to have than that it was somehow praiseworthy as many in this thread did. Just turns out in this case that the 'creepies' were right.
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Josh Duggar's crimes are one of the failure modes of a total lack of sexual education and absence of a system of gradual assumption of responsibility. It's also something that can happen in other systems/conditions, for other reasons, but I think it's nearly inevitable for some fraction of people in those conditions to do exactly this.
Gothard's crimes are similar - insist that everyone has to act happy all the time, and also submit to authority, and that pattern is fully set up.
That's something that I think a lot of groups fail to deal with: all the various failure modes. Not just the ones where someone steps out of line and has to be brought back, but what goes unseen or gets hidden? How does that feed back into the system? What can grow in this ecosystem?
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Yeah. Gays and transgender molest kids. BUT THIS GUY, oh, forgive him. Hide what Gothard did. Take the Pearl's horrible advice about how to abuse children to GROOM them for this sort of thing. WHAT IS WRONG WITH THIS WORLD?! Why don't these folks understand WHAT is really wrong?!
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Because women aren't fully human. Using women and girls will always be excusable to those who don't consider women to be as entirely, individually as human, as worthy as men. That is why gay molestation is so much worse. Men and boys are human and you don't do that to humans. Women and girls, though...
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I gotta wonder if you guys were this upset about Lena Dunham's biographical admission of having done pretty much the same thing to her sister. I say that because Lena still has a TV show and after basically just saying "sorry" for what she did the whole thing went away.
As someone who was a victim of numerous types of abuse (including sexual abuse) from a sibling, that kind of double standard really pisses me off, and makes me wonder if what you guys *actually* find objectionable about this incident is just its proximity to a set of beliefs that you don't like. /relurk
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Hey, listen, while you're clambering back up onto your cross as you scurry away and hide from a conversation you don't want to have (except to take shots and then leave), a few things to consider.
Speaking for myself I had to look up Lena Dunham and I suspect others would too. Having done so I can say that my only exposure to her has been a single episode of Adventure Time wherein she did some voice acting. To my awareness, anyway. Never watched Girls on HBO.
Second, it is pretty ridiculous of you to get all outraged and then say, "Y'all don't actually mind molesting children, it's conservatives!"
Third, correct me if I'm wrong but I'm not aware, now that I looked her up, that Dunham has any sort of history, say, claiming to be living a life in accordance with God's will, putting forth herself as a moral authority to others in a reality television show, pushing for legislation to control the behavior of others based on religion...you know. All that stuff.
People who claim divine insight as to the morality of their own behavior and that of others simply do not get to complain 'but what about the misbehavior of others!' You claim that much authority, you get the criticism it earns you.
Ok, now, need help nailing yourself back up there, or do you got that?
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If you are going to claim that the objectionable thing is the actual *act* of molestation, you better be consistent in your application of moral outrage, Rakeesh. It doesn't matter if they are conservative or claiming some type of moral authority.
Further, before going to the audacious extent of "apologizing" for her actions, she refused to accept any kind of responsibility for them and went to extreme lengths to defend herself from the criticism that was piled upon her.
And I'd be glad to have this conversation, if I had some actual time to do so, now that I'm married and have step kids to take care of. Then there's the fact that the only reason I'm pointing this out is the incredibly insulting nature of the discussion so far, and that's without considering the vast amount of logical fallacy and outright arrogance that has been shown. But I'd expect that in any echo chamber like this forum has become.
quote: Speaking for myself I had to look up Lena Dunham and I suspect others would too.
Ya think that might be because of that double standard I was talking about?
Edit: For information, go visit Lena's twitter feed and you'll see that almost every post involves some comment on feminism, then learn that she's a pretty prominent feminist activist. Then let's start talking about how a liberal who espouses the left wing ideals of sexual experimentation and free love should be allowed to continue to work in the entertainment industry after admitting to the sexual abuse of a 7 year old.
Note here that I don't give a crap about the Duggars being conservative. I think the show should be cancelled. But I think that if we're going to have that be the standard for people who committed sibling sexual abuse and their parents (who tried to cover it up) then we should apply that standard to *all* of them. Not just the ones we don't like.
[ May 27, 2015, 12:08 AM: Message edited by: Boris ]
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