I blogged a couple of months ago about Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar, a married couple in Arkansas that were expecting their 18th child. They were getting their own reality show on the Discovery Channel, 17 Kids and Counting. At the time I thought they were just incredibly weird. As it turns out, there is an actual name for what they are doing.

It’s called the Quiverful movement.

A quiver is the thing an archer uses to hold all of his arrows. To someone who practices Quiverful, their home is the quiver and their children are the arrows. The idea is to stock their quiver with as many arrows as they can. It’s practiced primarily by conservative Christian evangelicals here in the United States. They almost never use any form of birth control or any other type of family planning.

The Duggars are people living the Quiverful or “QF” life.

I still think it’s pretty weird. They must think very highly of their genes to so heavily overstock the gene pool. Evidently the Duggars can afford the Quiverful lifestyle. I read on the Discovery Channel website that they own their own cellphone tower. I didn’t even know they had cellphones in Arkansas.