I hope that by now, between molestation scandals, cheating spouses and porn addictions, nobody’s looking to the Duggars to be role models — or, at the very least, taking the things they say with a grain of salt. But just in case, we need to set the record straight right now on one thing: birth control.
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Some background: Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar just celebrated their 32-year wedding anniversary. That’s really cool. Congratulations to them, because that’s a hella long time to be married.
But with their celebration came a blog post in which they revealed something shocking and scandalous about their past: The Duggars, early in their marriage, used birth control.
“Believe it or not, when we first got married we decided we did not want to have children right away, so Michelle began taking birth control pills,” Jim Bob wrote. “Three years into our marriage Michelle went off the pill and we had our first child. Then she went back on the pill, because we heard it was better to space your children out, but Michelle got pregnant while she was on the pill.”
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This is where things get messy, fam.
Jim Bob continued, “The pill caused her to miscarry. We talked to a Christian doctor and he explained that the pill could be abortive.”
Stop. Stop right there. Who is that doctor, because the information he’s allegedly giving the Duggars is simply factually wrong. Birth control pills are not abortive. Ever. Daily pills work by using a combination of hormones that already exist in a woman’s body — usually estrogen and progestin, which is synthetic progesterone — to stop ovulation from occurring. They can also thicken cervical mucous so sperm have a harder time getting up in there. It’s possible for a woman to become pregnant on birth control pills, like Michelle did, because no birth control is 100 percent effective. But once a pregnancy occurs, the pills have no effectwhatsoever on the fertilized egg. There is simply nothing in the chemical makeup of birth control pills that could cause them to abort a pregnancy.
There are a lot of reasons miscarriages can happen, but birth control pills are not one of them. Spreading that information could deter a lot of women from using birth control pills, which are a safe and effective method of family planning (that come with a lot of other health benefits for some women as well), and that’s just not OK.
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