Entertainment

Jill Duggar Admits To Using Condoms -- Does She Want A Trophy?

by Cassandra Stone
Jill Duggar Dillard/Instagram

Jill Duggar may not subscribe to many of her family’s ways anymore, but her new life is hardly groundbreaking

There are 19 children in the Duggar family, so it’s hardly a surprise that one or more of them would decide the extremist fundamental way of living wasn’t for them. It’s kind of a surprise that Jill is the first one to break away, mostly because her husband, Derick Dillard, is an out-loud-and-proud bigot which doesn’t exactly lend to a more progressive way of living. But Missionary Jill and Derick Dullard use condoms, so I guess we’re all supposed to applaud?

In a new cover story for PEOPLE, Jill admits that she and her family haven’t been seeing eye-to-eye lately. Particularly on the whole “give birth over and over again until your body withers into dust” mantra, which Jill now claims she isn’t into. Weird!

“Growing up, it was ingrained in me that if you don’t have as many kids as you’re able to, that there’s something wrong with that,” Jill, who is now 29 and doesn’t yet have 37 children which makes her a Fundie Failure, says. “But there was a shift in me where I felt like it wasn’t wrong if you decide as a couple that it’s best for you to wait.”

Jill and Derick have two sons: Israel David, 5, and Samuel Scott, 3. After giving birth to Israel via C-section in 2015, her doctor recommended she wait 18 months to get pregnant again. Because the human body is not actually intended to shoot children out like rounds of ammunition and needs time to heal in between the incredibly taxing ordeal of growing and birthing a child.

“Children are a blessing, but that doesn’t mean that at all costs you should have as many kids as possible,” she says. So she and Derick are using “barrier methods” and non-hormonal birth control, which she recently opened up about in a Q & A no one asked for.

In the PEOPLE interview, Jill says Jim Bob collected all the checks for both 19 Kids and Counting and Counting On, regardless of the fact that his very adult children were working for that money too. “That’s when we got an attorney involved and finally recovered some of the money,” she says. “It was a process.”

She and Derick say they quit the show because of this and the lack of control they had over their own lives regarding the show, but they conveniently do not mention the fact that TLC fired Derick for bullying Jazz Jennings, the transgender star of another TLC show.

Now here’s the thing. She says she and Derick see a therapist, which is honestly more shocking than the birth control thing when we’re talking about people who come from these extreme Christian zealot backgrounds. And she uses a lot of language that she’s clearly getting from those therapy sessions, which means it’s resonating with her and opening her eyes to the world beyond the “Christian soldier” bubble she was indoctrinated into. She’s thinking for herself now, she’s drinking alcohol, she’s wearing pants and she’s dancing and listening to secular music, she’s got a nose ring, and she’s living her life for herself. Great.

But (you knew there was a “but” coming, come on) she’s still spreading misinformation (that hormonal birth control causes “abortions” when that couldn’t be further from the truth), and she and Derick still practice abhorrent and harmful politics that further disenfranchise marginalized people.

Call me when she ditches her lame husband and publicly supports reproductive rights and Medicare for All.