Secret Lives of Women on WEtv: Born to Breed (Quiverfull)

[Shallah Kali]

http://www.wetv.com/secret-lives-of-women/episodes/born-to-breed

They are women with large families – sometimes as many as 18 children – who call themselves and their belief system "Quiverfull." The name is borrowed from Psalm 127 (“Like arrows in the hands of a warrior are sons born in one’s youth. Blessed is the man whose quiver is full of them.”) It’s a grassroots movement among evangelical Christians based on the idea that “children are a gift from God.” These Quiverfull moms avoid birth control, home school their children and allow their husbands to make the decisions for the family. Join us as we meet two Quiverfull moms and another woman who decided to opt out of the movement when her life became too difficult. We’ll also talk with today’s foremost expert on Quiverfull women, Kathryn Joyce, to learn more about the religious aspects of the movement and those who live by it.

Video Clips:

15 & Counting http://www.wetv.com/video/48175134001/born-to-breed-15-and-counting

Worship http://www.wetv.com/video/48185315001/born-to-breed-worship

Defector http://www.wetv.com/video/48185344001/born-to-breed-defector

The Author http://www.wetv.com/video/48245414001/born-to-breed-the-author

All God's children
The Quiverfull movement saddles women with a life of submission and near-constant pregnancies. One mother explains how she embraced the extreme Christian lifestyle -- and why she left.
http://www.salon.com/mwt/feature/2009/03/14/joyce_quiverfull/

Quiverfull: Inside the Christian Patriarchy Movement
by Kathryn Joyce
http://books.google.com/books?id=WhhCQY_7sogC

My Womb for His Purposes: The Perils of Unassisted Childbirth in the Quiverfull Movement.
http://www.religiondispatches.org/archive/humanrights/1618/my_womb_for_his_purposes:_the_perils_of_unassisted_childbirth_in_the_quiverfull_movement


No Longer Quivering - a blog y women who left the Quiverful movement
http://nolongerquivering.com/


Arrows for the War
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20061127/joyce

Lives such as these: Janet Wolfson is a 44-year-old mother of eight in Canton, Georgia. Tracie Moore, a 39-year-old midwife who lives in southern Kentucky, is mother to fourteen. Wendy Dufkin in Coxsackie has her thirteen. And while Jamie Stoltzfus, a 27-year-old Illinois mom, has only four children so far, she plans on bearing enough to populate "two teams." All four mothers are devoted to a way of life New York Times columnist David Brooks has praised as a new spiritual movement taking hold among exurban and Sunbelt families. Brooks called these parents "natalists" and described their progeny as a new wave of "Red-Diaper Babies"--as in "red state."

But Wolfson, Moore and thousands of mothers like them call themselves and their belief system "Quiverfull." They borrow their name from Psalm 127: "Like arrows in the hands of a warrior are sons born in one's youth. Blessed is the man whose quiver is full of them. They will not be put to shame when they contend with their enemies in the gate." Quiverfull mothers think of their children as no mere movement but as an army they're building for God.

Quiverfull parents try to have upwards of six children. They home-school their families, attend fundamentalist churches and follow biblical guidelines of male headship--"Father knows best"--and female submissiveness. They refuse any attempt to regulate pregnancy. Quiverfull began with the publication of Rick and Jan Hess's 1989 book, A Full Quiver: Family Planning and the Lordship of Christ, which argues that God, as the "Great Physician" and sole "Birth Controller," opens and closes the womb on a case-by-case basis. Women's attempts to control their own bodies--the Lord's temple--are a seizure of divine power.

snip

"Our bodies are meant to be a living sacrifice," write the Hesses. Or, as Mary Pride, in another of the movement's founding texts, The Way Home: Beyond Feminism, Back to Reality, puts it, "My body is not my own." This rebuttal of the feminist health text Our Bodies, Ourselves is deliberate. Quiverfull women are more than mothers. They're domestic warriors in the battle against what they see as forty years of destruction wrought by women's liberation: contraception, women's careers, abortion, divorce, homosexuality and child abuse, in that order.

Talk2Action has several articles as well: http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Atalk2action.org+quiverfull&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a

[imdjh]

1. I just think it sounds nasty.

[supernova]

2. Abuse of women

with their consent.

THis is as crazy as a social movement can get.

[Blue_In_AK]

3. I never heard of this movement.

I can't imagine having that many kids ... I had three, well spaced out, and even then I felt overwhelmed sometimes. EIGHTEEN!!! Yikes.

[Shallah Kali]

4. Heard of the Duggar's? They are a Quiverfull family

Extreme Motherhood

Understanding Quiverfull, the antifeminist, conservative Christian movement that motivates popular reality-TV families like the Duggars.

http://www.newsweek.com/id/189763

Often, children of the movement are also called "arrows." Quiverfull takes its name from Psalm 127: "Like arrows in the hands of a warrior are sons born in one's youth. Blessed is the man whose quiver is full of them. They will not be put to shame when they contend with their enemies in the gate." A wealth of military metaphors follows from this namesake, as Pride and her fellow advocates urge women toward militant fecundity in the service of religious rebirth: creating what they bluntly refer to as an army of devout children to wage spiritual battle against God's enemies. As Quiverfull author Rachel Scott writes in her 2004 movement book, "Birthing God's Mighty Warriors," "Children are our ammunition in the spiritual realm to whip the enemy! These special arrows were handcrafted by the warrior himself and were carefully fashioned to achieve the purpose of annihilating the enemy."

Quiverfull advocates Rick and Jan Hess, authors of 1990's "A Full Quiver: Family Planning and the Lordship of Christ," envision the worldly gains such a method could bring, if more Christians began producing "full quivers" of "arrows for the war": control of both houses of Congress, the "reclamation" of sinful cities like San Francisco and massive boycotts of companies that do not comply with conservative Christian mores. "If the body of Christ had been reproducing as we were designed to do," the Hesses write, "we would not be in the mess we are today." Nancy Campbell, author of another movement book from 2003 called "Be Fruitful and Multiply," exhorts Christian women to do just that with promises of spiritual glory. "Oh what a vision," she writes, "to invade the earth with mighty sons and daughters who have been trained and prepared for God's divine purposes."

[A HERETIC I AM]

6. ...The Duggar Family...

[Marlana]

11. Every time I see the Duggars I think of this picture.

[Blue_In_AK]

8. Yes, I've heard of them,

but haven't paid much attention. Wouldn't it be ironic if all these kids they're raising to be part of "God's Army" or whatever become radically disaffected as teens or young adults and all become Godless heathens? Isn't it a natural phenomenon for kids to rebel against their parents, or has this tendency towards self-actualization been bred out of these people?

[notadmblnd]

9. It's just too bad that their god is so weak, that he needs children to fight his battle

nt

[Lone_Star_Dem]

5. What I wonder about is why our society is suddenly so fixtated on these supersized families?

I keep seeing these adherents in newspapers and on television. How many times have the Duggars made the national morning show circuit now? I've I've also seen the author of Birthing God's Mighty Warriors on television several times. Even the Natalists have been getting media time.

[Zomby Woof]

7. 'A Handmaid's Tale' may yet come to pass

They're breeding faster than bunnies on speed.

[eppur_se_muova]

10. "Blessed is the man", or at least bloated is his ego.

Look at me! I'm a macho super-virile man with {insert number} offspring! I wanted to do this anyway but now my religion has given me an excuse! Now if only my religion promoted polygamy!

Oh, now I've found a new religion! Moving to Utah!

[juno jones]

12. K&R! n/t

[Phoebe Loosinhouse]

13. My question is very simple - how do they afford it? nt.