The “Quiver Full” Movement: Women and Children as Victims

Today I came across a fairly older blog post about the "Quiver Full" movement.  It can be found here .

The post begins with a bit of self promotion, but goes on to talk about this woman’s experience as a "quiver full" mother.  Individuals who are a part of this movement leave family planning up to God and try to have as many children as possible.  She describes how women and children are the victims of this situation and the cult-like feeling of the whole movement. She describes the horrifying situations that many of these women are put in and how the media doesn’t cover this side of the story:

They don’t publicize the stories of the women I know– women who have lived in, birthed in, delapidated trailers or shacks without power or running water because their husbands wanted to live “debt-free,” women who have survived on $100 per month for food for seven or eight kids and $25 per month for clothes for those kids, for years, because that’s all their patriarch husbands would allow them.  They don’t publicize the many women who have suffered rapes, beatings, and been told by their “elders” they should pray about it, be a better wife

A lot of people that I grew up with "always knew" they wanted to have a lot of children.  I also grew up in an area of the south where half of the kids I went to school with were very affluent and the other half seemed to be destitutely poor.  Since graduating from high school 3 years ago, I’ve found out that many of the people that I graduated with have already had not just one child, but several. 

While I respect their decisions, it saddens me a bit to see these women, who are the product of a fundamentalist Christian upbringing.  Many of them live on the edge of poverty relying on their husbands’ meager income to support their continually growing families.  After reading this woman’s post it made me think of these young women who I went to school with and, while their situations are probably not as extreme, are still victims of this fundamental and patriarchal ideology.