Whether Joy-Anna Duggar got pregnant after marrying Austin Forsyth or almost definitely got pregnant before her wedding, she’ll be giving birth at some point.
We — no one — will know when the birthing will take place. But we might have some hints about how.
It looks like, just as the Duggars reject so much of what the world has to offer, Joy-Anna might be planning to ignore medical science and give birth at home.
Before we get into home birthing, the question of when she gives birth is still relevant.
Honestly, we’ve been doing the math again and again, and unless Austin Forsyth and Joy-Anna have magical genitals that let them conceive on their wedding night, everything seems to add up to them conceiving before marriage.
Which is fine, because they are people. Having premarital sex is what normal people do all over the world.
But Austin and Joy-Anna exist on the fringes of society, actively shunning so much of what makes American culture so wonderful and unique.
Even so, the couple — notorious within their family for their PDA — ended up getting what looks like a shotgun wedding back in May.
Joy-Anna reported that she felt the baby kick for the first time “a few days ago,” saying this back on October 1st.
The timing of that, based upon normal fetal development, would mean that she will be due in February of 2018.
Now, pregnancies are seldom exact, but even if she doesn’t give birth until the last day of February, that would mean that she got pregnant within, like, a week of getting married.
(For reference, the average couple takes about a year of trying before they conceive, though obviously there are exceptions)
If she is indeed due in February, it seems more likely that Joy-Anna conceived much earlier in May.
And, quite frankly, Joy-Anna may be sharing old baby bump pics to fool fans about how far along she is. It’s smart, but that trick won’t work forever.
If she gives birth before February, well, the Duggars will probably spin it as a “premature delivery.”
Are you familiar with home births?
Even the people who do it admit that home birthing is kind of nuts.
Because, for the most part, home birthing involves taking centuries of medical progress and just … setting it aside.
Home birthing involves giving birth at home, inside of your house. You know, like a cat.
No doctors, which, even if there isn’t an emergency, means none of the epidural painkillers that make childbirth bearable. You might have a midwife or one of those other hipster equivalents.
Jim Gaffigan, whose wife delivered their numerous children via home birth, talks about the process in his stand-up comedy:
“We had all our babies at home, just to make you feel uncomfortable.”
He’s never been afraid to poke fun at himself:
“People don’t wanna hear about home birth; they’re like: ‘Oh, you had your baby at home? Yeah, we were gonna do that, because we wanted our baby to live."”
There’s some exaggeration there, but there are plenty of babies who struggle with basic functions shortly after birth. A home birth means that they might have to immediately be rushed to the hospital that their parents just stubbornly avoided.
We don’t know what Austin Forsyth thinks about home birthing, but since Joy-Anna wears the pants in their relationship — metaphorically — we guess that it’ll be up to Duggar tradition.
Jessa Duggar has tried home birthing twice, though the first time didn’t go so well and, after 10 hours of labor, she had to dip her toes into the world of modern medicine.
The second time, though, Jessa gave birth at home.
Jill has tried home birthing twice and, both times, needed a C-section. In the case of Israel, she went through 70 hours of labor before the C-section.
C-sections, folks, are not do-it-yourself procedures, so hospitals are a must. Honestly, it’s bizarre that Jill even tried the second birth at home.
Michelle Duggar, from whom no one should take advice of any sort, has also apparently home birthed some of her children.
We don’t know if Joy-Anna is planning to follow in their footsteps.
We do know that Joy-Anna has been open to taking advice from her sisters in the past.
Jill is super gung ho about home birthing in part because Jill is practiced at midwifery, a skill that she’s allegedly used during her dubious missionary work.
We’ll find out, we suppose … unless Joy-Anna gives birth at home and tries to hide that fact until late February.
As we learned thanks to the Josh Duggar molestation cover-up, the Duggars are more than happy to hide their scandals — real and imagined — if they think that it makes their family look godlier.
