According to People: “After the appointment, we came back home and told the children. We had just been talking about baby names last night and they were getting excited about naming a boy or a girl. It has been a real sad disappointment.”
“I feel like my heart broke telling my children. They have all been so excited about this baby and looking forward to April coming around and having a new little one in our arms. That was the most difficult. The Lord is the giver of life and he can choose when that life is ready to go on and be with Him.” The couple have 19 children.
There are many critics of the Duggars; people who believe they should have stopped at 5 children, 10 or even 15. People who criticise the risks they Duggars are taking by refusing to use contraception – even after their 19th child was born extremely prematurely two years ago, spent months in hospital and continues to suffer severe medical complications.
Whatever your view on that, the latest controversy around the Duggars is about something different. It’s about the way they chose to commemorate the loss of their 20th child Jubilee in a memorial service last week.
The images were originally intended only for private viewing by those present but when a young cousin at the memorial service tweeted them and they became public, the Duggars posted one of the images as a background to an audio of the eulogy Michelle Duggar wrote for her daughter (you can hear it below).
Cue: outcry among some who have described the images as ‘creepy’ among other things. Writer Roz Zurko from the Hartford Examiner wrote:
The Duggar’s tweeting a picture of their miscarried baby and using pictures of the fetus for memorial cards is getting some backlash today. The use of the fetus for this purpose is called “creepy” and “in bad taste today.” While many are reporting on the story today, it was the National Enquirer who finally came out and said what others may be thinking. “This is just creepy.”
Sure, the images are confronting to look at and they certainly make me think in very different terms about Jubilee, and the Duggars’ loss. There is something about seeing the perfectly formed hands and feet of Jubilee that makes her seem more “real”, more like a daughter and less like a statistic. In our culture, we are generally very uncomfortable about dealing with grief. We struggle with words when our friends fall sick, we falter when someone dies and often we have no idea how to express our own sorrow. But not the Duggars. They expressed their grief very openly via a memorial service for their 20th daughter. And I for one applaud them. They are mourning the loss of their child as they would the death of any child.
Answering The Question Adolescence Asks
This Glorious Mess
