Jill Dillard Isn’t the Only Duggar Family Member Who Refused to Have Her Labor Filmed
For over 10 years, the Duggar family had every critical moment of their lives filmed, including labor and delivery, and many mundane moments, too. As the cast of one of TLC’s most successful reality TV shows, the Duggar kids grew up on camera. Now, several years after the last episode of Counting On aired, the adult children are opening up about the problems that arose from their unconventional lifestyle. Two Duggar couples have now revealed they dealt with pushback when they asked not to have the birth of their children filmed.
Austin Forsyth recalls taking ‘heat’ for asking that his son’s birth not be filmed
The Duggar family might not have been big on privacy. After all, the 19 kids grew up in shared rooms, never went anywhere alone, and had built-in “accountability” buddies at every turn. The lack of boundaries led to plenty of awkward moments. It also allowed TLC to capture moments that should have been private.
As more of the adult Duggar kids speak out, the more family followers are learning about how difficult it was for them to say no. Joy-Anna and Austin Forsyth recently opened up about what it was like for them to opt out of having the birth of their first son, Gideon Forsyth, filmed.
During an appearance on The Jinger and Jeremy Podcast, Austin Forsyth discussed the difficulty he experienced while adjusting to life in front of a camera and how the Duggar family operated. Austin revealed that he took a lot of “heat” for refusing to allow the birth of his first child with Joy-Anna to be filmed. Austin said there was an assumption that all Duggar family labor and deliveries would be filmed, as several others had already aired. He pointed out that Jessa Seewald and Jill Dillard agreed to film their labor experiences before Gideon’s arrival.
Jill and Derick Dillard opted to keep camera crews out, too
While Austin implied that he and Joy were the first Duggar couple to deny a film crew access to labor and delivery, that wasn’t the case. Jill and Derick Dillard attempted to keep the arrival of Israel Dillard in 2015 private but “lost.” They captured their own footage for the network.
They gave more pushback in 2017, though. The couple refused to have their second son’s birth filmed. Samuel Dillard arrived in July 2017, seven months before Gideon’s birth.
The decision was so out of character that for years, Duggar family followers suspected that TLC had filmed the birth but that something had gone terribly wrong, leading to the decision to scrap the footage. They were half right. While the birth was, in fact, complicated and led to emergency intervention for Jill, camera crews were never there to capture Samuel’s emergency arrival.
Derick and Jill pulled back the curtain and revealed what happened with Samuel’s birth in Jill’s hit memoir, Counting the Cost. They also touched on how their decision to keep TLC away led to trouble with Jim Bob Duggar. Jill did not openly discuss her siblings or their personal choices in the non-fiction offering. She opened up about the decision following the memoir’s release, insisting that each of her siblings is on their own journey and should have the right to tell their own story if and when they choose.
