While fans of the Duggars wait to hear if Counting On has been renewed or canceled, some are waiting for something else: to find out what Jana Duggar is going to do with her life.
Is she ever going to get married? Is she going to remain in the Duggar household forever? In many ways, the eldest Duggar daughter remains a mystery to fans.
But there’s a chance that Jana Duggar has one job that might take her outside of the Duggar household every now and then. Fans want to know: is Jana a midwife?
In the Duggar household, a strange fertility cult that operates on the fringes of society and upholds fundamentalist beliefs that even die-hard conservative Christians eye askance, women are not independent beings.
That is to say that, effectively, daughters belong to their fathers until they’re married off, at which point their husbands are in charge of everything from how they dress to what they might do for a living.
In the mean time, there’s no sex, there’s no kissing, there’s no unsupervised courting, and there is no front-hugging.
In fact, the unmarried Duggar women — no matter what age — aren’t allowed to use social media.
(We have to imagine that Josh Duggar’s sex scandals — the cheating, not the molestation — are partially to blame for that policy, because the Duggars like to place blame with everything except Josh himself)
Jana, though she’s the eldest daughter at 27 years (she’ll be 28 next month), isn’t on social media, which is why fans so often have to guess in order to know anything about Jana that isn’t shown on Counting On.
However, though this situation means that we only get glimpses and rumors of things like Jana’s likely courtship with Caleb, Jana does get the occasional opportunity to speak for herself.
Back in 2013 (which, from the perspective of the Duggars, was probably a better, simpler time), Jana and her sister Jill did a guest blog for TLC.
At the time, Jill was in midwifery school (that sounds like a fake word for it, we know) because she wanted to become a Certified Professional Midwife (CPM).
Jana’s situation was a little less formal.
At the time, she wrote that she was “working under a local midwife.” She also added that she was working “as a midwife assistant and doula.”
Jill went on to get certified as a midwife in 2015. But there’s no record of Jana doing anything of the sort.
The reason that we bring this up, aside from viewers’ curiosity over what Jana does with her life and fans’ desire for Jana Duggar to get a life, is because midwifery is becoming increasingly relevant.
Joy-Anna Duggar is pregnant with Austin Forsyth’s baby. The couple married in what is widely believed to have been a shotgun wedding, because Joy-Anna’s version of when she got pregnant — claiming that it was after the wedding — seems suspect.
One way or the other, though, Joy-Anna is pregnant and there’s been speculation that Joy-Anna Duggar might have a home birth.
This practice, where you eschew a hospital visit and try to give birth from the discomfort of your own home, is popular within the Duggar family, even if it doesn’t always work out so well.
So, when it comes time for Joy-Anna to deliver, is Jana Duggar going to helping out?
We don’t know, quite frankly.
But, despite John-David’s excited story of Jana helping to deliver a calf in a very hands-on manner, and despite the training that Jana has clearly had … she’s still not really a midwife.
Jill Duggar is a certified midwife. She can totally help out. But Jana, at the very least, lack’s Jill’s certification.
These days, Jana spends her time being very handy around the house. She acts as a caregiver to her much-younger siblings, she gardens, she cleans, she cooks, and she’s even handy with a hammer and nails.
So while we don’t know that Jana’s going to help bring any new Duggar babies into the world any time soon — her own or those of her siblings — she’s not sitting on her hands, hoping that her prince will one day arrive and sweep her off of her feet as has happened for several of her younger sisters.
When Jana gets married is her business, folks.
But we are allowed to wonder what’s holding her back.
