Many have wondered why the large Duggar family, featured on “19 Kids and Counting” on TLC, don’t use contraception or other forms of birth control.
Recently, father Jim Bob Duggar offered a controversial explanation.
Jim Bob revealed that his wife, Michelle, was on birth control after they gave birth to their oldest child, Josh, in 1988.
“Something we didn’t know is that the pill can allow women to get pregnant, but then it can be aborted,” Jim Bob said, according to Fox Radio. “That’s what happened with Michelle… She went on the pill after Josh and then got pregnant, and then the pill actually caused a miscarriage, and so that was really when we started examining this. We started looking at the fine print of the contraception, and it said this could happen, and then we talked to a Christian doctor, and he explained this to us.”
However, the Mayo Clinic and a number of medical professionals say that the pill isn’t linked to miscarriages or “abortions.”
“In the past, doctors had concerns that if you conceived immediately after stopping the pill, you had a higher risk of miscarriage. However, these concerns have proved to be largely unfounded. The hormones in birth control pills don’t linger in your system… If you continued taking your birth control pill because you didn’t realize you were pregnant, don’t be alarmed. Despite years of this accident happening, there’s very little evidence that exposure to the hormones in birth control pills causes birth defects,” says the Mayo Clinic.
