Insert Arkansas Joke ----> Here _________________

Insert Bill Clinton DNA Joke here -----> Here ___________________

Your police state example is extreme. Having 18 kids is extreme. There's no reasonable middle ground between the two extremes? If this it what God expects of you, add this to my reasons I'm glad I'm not a believer.

Meh, they're not gonna tip the world over with their kids.

All the children—whose names start with the letter J—are home-schooled.

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

'PHISH' date='May 9 2008, 12:17 PM' post='108096']


Yeah but imagine if everyone had that many kids?! You wouldn't be able to move!



Why do people do this? Like keeping track of all those names won't be hard enough, you have to name them all with the same letter. Ridiculous.



I find this logic to be completely ridiculous. God also wills you to be responsible and make good decisions, but never mind that.

Frist of all, not many people have large families anymore and I really doubt that it's going to become a threatening trend at any time. So, rest your mind on that one.

People can name their kids whatever they want...... Laugh all you want, but I still think that it's not worth making fun of. I could not do that, just cuz I don't think that way. But, we have friends who have three children whose first names all begin with an N. Is this ridiculous??? hmmm.

And the fact that they live by their faith and are responsible is their right. Just like you want the right to live with whoever you desire. And I would never tell you that you couldn't do that. Or that you were being rediculous or that the fact that you believe God made you the way you are is irresponsible.

Wow. Are you that dense that you don't see a connection between overpopulation and enviromental strain or is this just more of your devil's advocacy?

Did I ever state that they should have restrictions put on them or that they should be outlawed from further procreation? Nope. IN MY OPINION, their reasoning is flawed for living such a lifestyle and they're being environmentally irresponsible. Also, if everyone followed their path (and thank GOD they don't), we would have to enact such restrictions. That's just a fact of life - like it or not.

They sure didn't shy away from any media publicity did they? Oh, and how about those tax breaks they must get!?

What a shame.

Pls answer me this...... again, if this family were amish and working on a farm and had this many children, would you be as adamant about this outrageous amount of kids?

Being enviornmentally irresponsible.......Oh my. How do you know that they are?? There is much to be said on this one. One small family can be just as much irresponsible in their misuse of the enviornment too. I don't buy your logic, Phish. I understand that you don't want this world and it's resources abused, but man, let's look at the average american before we lump big (in the minority) families as rediculous.

As the century begins, natural resources are under increasing pressure, threatening public health and development. Water shortages, soil exhaustion, loss of forests, air and water pollution, and degradation of coastlines afflict many areas. As the world’s population grows, improving living standards without destroying the environment is a global challenge.

Most developed economies currently consume resources much faster than they can regenerate. Most developing countries with rapid population growth face the urgent need to improve living standards. As we humans exploit nature to meet present needs, are we destroying resources needed for the future?

Environment getting worse
About 3 million die from pollution each year.In the past decade in every environmental sector, conditions have either failed to improve, or they are worsening:

Public health:
Unclean water, along with poor sanitation, kills over 12 million people each year, most in developing countries. Air pollution kills nearly 3 million more. Heavy metals and other contaminants also cause widespread health problems.
Amount of land lost to farming by degradation equals 2/3 of North America.Food supply:
Will there be enough food to go around? In 64 of 105 developing countries studied by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, the population has been growing faster than food supplies. Population pressures have degraded some 2 billion hectares of arable land — an area the size of Canada and the U.S.

Freshwater:
The supply of freshwater is finite, but demand is soaring as population grows and use per capita rises. By 2025, when world population is projected to be 8 billion, 48 countries containing 3 billion people will face shortages.

Coastlines and oceans:
Half of all coastal ecosystems are pressured by high population densities and urban development. A tide of pollution is rising in the world’s seas. Ocean fisheries are being overexploited, and fish catches are down.

The demand for forest products exceeds sustainable consumption by 25%.

Forests:
Nearly half of the world’s original forest cover has been lost, and each year another 16 million hectares are cut, bulldozed, or burned. Forests provide over US$400 billion to the world economy annually and are vital to maintaining healthy ecosystems. Yet, current demand for forest products may exceed the limit of sustainable consumption by 25%.
2/3 of the world’s species are in decline.

Biodiversity:
The earth’s biological diversity is crucial to the continued vitality of agriculture and medicine — and perhaps even to life on earth itself. Yet human activities are pushing many thousands of plant and animal species into extinction. Two of every three species is estimated to be in decline.

Global climate change:
The earth’s surface is warming due to greenhouse gas emissions, largely from burning fossil fuels. If the global temperature rises as projected, sea levels would rise by several meters, causing widespread flooding. Global warming also could cause droughts and disrupt agriculture.

Toward a livable future
How people preserve or abuse the environment could largely determine whether living standards improve or deteriorate. Growing human numbers, urban expansion, and resource exploitation do not bode well for the future. Without practicing sustainable development, humanity faces a deteriorating environment and may even invite ecological disaster.

Taking action:
Many steps toward sustainability can be taken today. These include: using energy more efficiently, managing cities better, phasing out subsidies that encourage waste, [etc.]
The world must sustain 1 billion more people every 13 years.Stabilizing population:
While population growth has slowed, the absolute number of people continues to increase — by about 1 billion every 13 years. Slowing population growth would help improve living standards and would buy time to protect natural resources. In the long run, to sustain higher living standards, world population size must stabilize.
Less growth will provide time to solve sustainability problems.

Population and sustainable development
Environmentalists and economists increasingly agree that efforts to protect the environment and to achieve better living standards can be closely linked and are mutually reinforcing. Slowing the increase in population, especially in the face of rising per capita demand for natural resources, can take pressure off the environment and buy time to improve living standards on a sustainable basis.3,8,11,12

As population growth slows, countries can invest more in education, health care, job creation, and other improvements that help boost living standards.11 In turn, as individual income, savings, and investment rise, more resources become available that can boost productivity. This dynamic process has been identified as one of the key reasons that the economies of many Asian countries grew rapidly between 1960 and 1990.

A dynamic economy also needs slower population growth.In recent years fertility has been falling in many developing countries and, as a result, annual world population growth has fallen to about 1.4% in 2000 compared with about 2% in 1960. The UN estimated recently that population is growing by about 78 million per year, down from about 90 million estimated early in the 1990s.10 Still, at the current pace world population increases by about 1 billion every 13 years. World population surpassed 6 billion in 1999 and is projected to rise to over 8 billion by 2025.
In many countries, births far outnumber deaths, creating overpopulation.Globally, fertility has fallen by half since the 1960s, to about three children per woman. In 65 countries, including 9 in the developing world, fertility rates have fallen below replacement level of about two children per woman. Nonetheless, fertility is above replacement level in 123 countries, and in some countries it is substantially above replacement level. In these countries the population continues to increase rapidly. About 1.7 billion people live in 47 countries where the fertility rate averages between three and five children per woman. Another 730 million people live in 44 countries where the average woman has five children or more.

The rise in populations is mainly in developing nations.Almost all population growth is in the developing world. As a result of differences in population growth, Europe’s population will decline from 13% to 7% of world population over the next quarter century, while that of sub-Saharan Africa will rise from 10% to 17%. The shares of other regions are projected to remain about the same as today.6
Parts of Africa will experience drastic water shortages by 2025.As population and demand for natural resources continue to grow, environmental limits will become increasingly apparent.6 Water shortages are expected to affect nearly 3 billion people in 2025, with sub-Saharan Africa worst affected.2 Many countries could avoid environmental crises if they took steps now to conserve and manage supplies and demand better, while slowing population growth by providing families and individuals with information and services needed to make informed choices about reproductive health.

Family planning is effective in stabilizing growth.Family planning programs play a key role. When family planning information and services are widely available and accessible, couples are better able to achieve their fertility desires.4 “Even in adverse circumstance — low incomes, limited education, and few opportunities for women — family planning programs have meant slower population growth and improved family welfare,” the World Bank has noted.

If every country made a commitment to population stabilization and resource conservation, the world would be better able to meet the challenges of sustainable development. Practicing sustainable development requires a combination of wise public investment, effective natural resource management, cleaner agricultural and industrial technologies, less pollution, and slower population growth.

Conclusion: We risk destroying our standard of living if we don’t control population growth.Worries about a “population bomb” may have lessened as fertility rates have fallen, but the world’s population is projected to continue expanding until the middle of the century. Just when it stabilizes and thus the level at which it stabilizes will have a powerful effect on living standards and the global environment. As population size continues to reach levels never before experienced, and per capita consumption rises, the environment hangs in the balance.

Why is raising a family a shame?

Seriously though, it is a shame because the kids should only worry about being kids and not having to deal with raising children until their parents drop dead.

Man, if my kids were that helpful and happy, you wouldn't hear me complaining. Big families have alot of responsibility but they have alot of people to love and love them back.

Sometimes you guys are sooo negative. That family seems to be doing fine to me. Go pick on somebody else.

Who are you to judge? Who are you to say that the more than slightly creepy 39-year-old woman from Arkansas who just gave birth to her 16th child yes that's right 16 kids and try not to cringe in phantom vaginal pain when you say it, who are you to say Michelle Duggar is not more than a little unhinged and sad and lost?

And furthermore, who are you to suggest that her equally troubling husband -- whose name is, of course, Jim Bob and he's hankerin' to be a Republican senator and try not to wince in sociopolitical pain when you say that -- isn't more than a little numb to the real world, and that bringing 16 hungry mewling attention-deprived kids (and she wants more! Yay!) into this exhausted world zips right by "touching" and races right past "disturbing" and lurches its way, heaving and gasping and sweating from the karmic armpits, straight into "Oh my God, what the hell is wrong with you people?"

But that would be, you know, mean. Mean and callous to suggest that this might be the most disquieting photo you see all year, this bizarre Duggar family of 18 spotless white hyperreligious interchangeable people with alarmingly bad hair, the kids ranging in ages from 1 to 17, worse than those nuked Smurfs in that UNICEF commercial and worse than all the horrific rubble in Pakistan and worse than the cluster-bomb nightmare that is Katie Holmes and Tom Cruise having a child as they suck the skin from each other's Scientological faces and even worse than that huge 13-foot python which ate that six-foot alligator and then exploded.

It's wrong to be this judgmental. Wrong to suggest that it is exactly this kind of weird pathological protofamily breeding-happy gluttony that's making the world groan and cry and recoil, contributing to vicious overpopulation rates and unrepentant economic strain and a bitter moral warpage resulting from a massive viral outbreak of homophobic neo-Christians across our troubled and Bush-ravaged land. Or is it?

Is it wrong to notice how all the Duggar kids' names start with the letter J (Jeremiah and Josiah and Jedediah and Jesus, someone please stop them), and that if you study the above photo (or the even more disturbing family Web site) too closely you will become rashy and depressed and you will crave large quantities of alcohol and loud aggressive music to deflect the creeping feeling that this planet is devolving faster than you can suck the contents from a large bong? But I'm not judging.

I have a friend who used to co-babysit (yes, it required two sitters) for a family of 10 kids, and she reports that they were, almost without fail, manic and hyper and bewildered and attention deprived in the worst way, half of them addicted to prescription meds to calm their neglected nerves and the other half bound for years of therapy due to complete loss of having the slightest clue as to who they actually were, lost in the family crowd, just another blank, needy face at the table. Is this the guaranteed affliction for every child of very large families? Of course not. But I'm guessing it's more common than you imagine.

What's more, after the 10th kid popped out, the family doctor essentially prohibited the baby-addicted mother from having any more offspring, considering the pummeling endured by her various matronly systems, and it's actually painful to imagine the logistics, the toll on Michelle Duggar's body, the ravages it has endured to give birth to roughly one child per year for nearly two decades, and you cannot help but wonder about her body and its various biological and sexual ... no, no, it is not for this space to visualize frighteningly capacious vaginal dimensions. It is not for this space to imagine this couple's soggy sexual mutations. We do not have enough wine on hand for that.

Perhaps the point is this: Why does this sort of bizarre hyperbreeding only seem to afflict antiseptic megareligious families from the Midwest? In other words -- assuming Michelle and Jim Bob and their massive brood of cookie-cutter Christian kidbots will all be, as the charming photo suggests, never allowed near a decent pair of designer jeans or a tolerable haircut from a recent decade, and assuming that they will all be tragically encoded with the values of the homophobic asexual Christian right -- where are the forces that shall help neutralize their effect on the culture? Where is the counterbalance, to offset the damage?

Where is, in other words, the funky tattooed intellectual poetess who, along with her genius anarchist husband, is popping out 16 funky progressive intellectually curious fashion-forward pagan offspring to answer the Duggar's squad of über-white future Wal-Mart shoppers? Where is the liberal, spiritualized, pro-sex flip side? Verily I say unto thee, it ain't lookin' good.

Perhaps this the scariest aspect of our squishy birthin' tale: Maybe the scales are tipping to the neoconservative, homogenous right in our culture simply because they tend not to give much of a damn for the ramifications of wanton breeding and environmental destruction and pious sanctimony, whereas those on the left actually seem to give a whit for the health of the planet and the dire effects of overpopulation. Is that an oversimplification?

Why does this sort of thoughtfulness seem so far from the norm? Why is having a stadiumful of offspring still seen as some sort of happy joyous thing?

You already know why. It is the Biggest Reason of All. Children are, after all, God's little gifts. Kids are little blessings from the Lord, the Almighty's own screaming spitballs of joy. Hell, Jim Bob said so himself, when asked if the couple would soon be going for a 17th rug rat: "We both just love children and we consider each a blessing from the Lord. I have asked Michelle if she wants more and she said yes, if the Lord wants to give us some she will accept them." This is what he actually said. And God did not strike him dead on the spot.

Let us be clear: I don't care what sort of God you believe in, it's a safe bet that hysterical breeding does not top her list of desirables. God does not want more children per acre than there are ants or mice or garter snakes or repressed pedophilic priests. We already have three billion humans on the planet who subsist on less than two dollars a day. Every other child in the world (one billion of them) lives in abject poverty. We are burning through the planet's resources faster than a Republican can eat an endangered caribou stew. Note to Michelle Duggar: If God wanted you to have a massive pile of children, she'd have given your uterus a hydraulic pump and a revolving door. Stop it now.

Ah, but this is America, yes? People should be allowed to do whatever the hell they want with their families if they can afford it and if it's within the law and so long as they aren't gay or deviant or happily flouting Good Christian Values, right? Shouldn't they? Hell, gay couples still can't openly adopt a baby in most states (they either lie, or one adopts and the other must apply as "co-parent"), but Michelle Duggar can pop out 16 kids and no one says, oh my freaking God, stop it, stop it now, you thoughtless, selfish, baby-drunk people.

No, no one says that. That would be mean.

So, now I see what the real problem is...... If I can't have it my way, neither should they?? hmmmm??

If I can't have it my way, neither should they?? hmmmm??

What would you have them do, Phish??

They are living by their beliefs and obviously you don't agree, but you gotta give them some credit for having a healthy, happy in tact family.

I certainly don't think these parents are the worst in the world

baby-making factory

And, thus, the debate.....

It just seems like a put down. Sometimes, I've noticed that people try to find ways to put down people when they try to live with a firm religious belief.

It tends to be overkill at times.