Mitt Romney's Advice for Recent Female Grads: "Have a Quiver Full of Kids"

[LittleBlue]

13. Scary quiverfull math

I watched 19 and Counting, showing a quiverfull family (the Duggars) where the mother has 19 children. Now let's do some scary napkin math.

I will assume that not every Duggar girl will possess the incredible fertility of their mother. That is very unusual even in times when birth control wasn't available. So let's say that every girl is capable of producing 11 children on average. That seems about right assuming every girl will maximize her breeding potential. They take no breaks inbetween pregnancies and use no birth control.

1 Duggar daughter
11 children
11 grandchildren per child x 11 children = 121 grandchildren
11 great grandchildren per grandchild = 121 x 11 = 1331 great grandchildren
Don't go any farther out, it gets really scary past this point. Into the tens and then hundreds of thousands.

So from one Duggar daughter will spring forth 1463 people who could all (minus 1 perhaps) theoretically vote during each other's lifetime. Compare that to the average woman who will have 2 or 3. Let's say 2.5 cubed, which is 15.63. So only around 20 versus 1.4k.

Mathematically this looks like an effective strategy. Even assuming 20% of the Duggar children leave the quiverfull movement, that's still over 800 descendants.