Duggar family update: Jim Bob Duggar admits to birth control use; Family keeping distance from Josh?

Michelle and Jim Bob DuggarFacebook/Duggar Family Official

The Duggar family has been known to have very strong religious beliefs, but as reported by the Hollywood Gossip, the family patriarch Jim Bob Duggar has revealed in a blog post that when he first married Michelle, they did resort to birth controls to avoid getting children while they were too young to support a family.

According to the blog post, Jim Bob admitted that he and Michelle used pills to hold off from having children but this misfired and Michelle did get pregnant. However, this led to a miscarriage and from that point on the couple has stopped using birth controls, reverting back to their religious belief that birth controls should not be allowed.

"Believe it or not, when we first got married we decided we did not want to have children right away, so Michelle began taking birth control pills. Michelle got pregnant while she was on the pill, and the pill caused her to miscarry," he explained in his post. "We talked to a Christian doctor and he explained that the pill could be abortive. However, after one miscarriage, we decided to stop rejecting 'god's gifts.'"

As noted by the Hollywood Gossip, this has caused many religious followers and fans of the Duggar family to call them hypocrites and sinners, stating that the family was not as devout as they try to portray themselves as. However, it is noted that this was during their very first year after getting married and it has been three decades since.

Jim Bob continued to note that three years after getting off birth control, they did have their first child, although Jim avoided mentioning their first-born by name. This is speculated to be due to the family avoiding Josh Duggar following the news that he had sexually molested several girls while he was a teenager, some of whom were his own sisters.