Jessa Duggar Admits Pregnancy Doesn’t Feel ‘Real’ Until She Hears Baby’s Heartbeat, But Believes Life Begins At Conception


Jessa Duggar made an admission about being pregnant that may shock some longtime fans of her family.

Jessa Duggar’s pregnancy will be the main focus of tonight’s episode of Counting On, and a recent teaser clip spoils one of the episode’s biggest moments. People shared the video, which shows Jessa and Ben listening to their baby’s heartbeat with a little help from Jill Duggar and her fetal doppler.

“Maybe we’ll hear two heartbeats, You never know,” Jessa teases before the big moment.

Jessa reveals that she’s 18 months pregnant before Jill uses the device to detect her fetus’ heartbeat. While talking to the Counting On cameras later, Jessa Duggar confesses that her pregnancy didn’t feel real until that moment even though she had already been experiencing two common side effects of being pregnant: morning sickness and food aversions.

“I think for me it’s encouraging,” Jessa says of getting to hear her baby’s heartbeat. “Especially after having gone through morning sickness and all of this. I’m not really showing a whole lot, but to be like, ‘Okay, there is a kid inside of there. I’m not just sick. It’s real, there’s a baby there.'”

Some fans may find Jessa Duggar’s comments surprising because the driving force behind the Duggars’ anti-abortion views is their belief that life begins at conception. According to Radar Online, Jessa and her sisters reveal their thoughts on abortion in their book, Growing Up Duggar.

“Don’t allow anyone to talk you into taking the life of your child,” they write. “Your baby is not a blob of tissue! … It’s a baby from the time it is conceived.”

However, in tonight’s episode of Counting On, Jessa admits that her baby didn’t feel “real” until 18 weeks after conception. She waited until she was 25 weeks pregnant to share her first baby bump selfie.

The Counting On teaser clip featuring Jessa’s pregnancy confession was released on the day after Jessa Duggar’s parents, Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar, revealed that that were attending the March of Life in Little Rock, Arkansas.

“Today, here in Arkansas and across the nation, the annual March for Life will take place,” a post on their family Facebook page read. “It’s a moment when millions across the nation come together to honor the unborn lives lost to abortion in our nation and to encourage our society to embrace a culture of life—one that protects the unborn, the elderly and the most vulnerable among us. Every life is precious!”

As People reports, Jessa Duggar attended the March for Life in 2015, and shared a few photos taken at the event with her social media followers.

Jessa Duggar hasn’t advertised her participation in the march this year, but her views on abortion are no secret. As Starcasm reports, she’s so strongly anti-abortion that she once caused a major controversy by comparing abortion to the Holocaust. As the Daily Mail reports, Jessa also donated all the gifts from her second baby shower to Loving Choices, a crisis pregnancy center in Arkansas. The anti-abortion organization promises free ultrasounds to women considering abortions.

“If you are pregnant and considering abortion, you may not need one,” the Loving Choices website reads. “Up to 25% of all pregnancies end in natural miscarriage. An ultrasound will help determine if your pregnancy is viable or at risk for a natural miscarriage, making an abortion unnecessary.”

According to Salon, many pregnancy crisis centers lure women in with promises of free pregnancy tests and ultrasounds. However, clients who reveal that they’re thinking about getting abortions may be bombarded with “anti-choice propaganda full of lies about how they are supposedly going to suffer and die if they get abortions.”

As the Inquisitr previously reported, Jessa Duggar’s husband and his parents recently made their thoughts about the medical procedure known. Instead of trying to articulate his own opinions on the matter, Ben Seewald tweeted a link to an anti-abortion article by a theologian he admires. And over on the Seewald family Instagram page, his parents shared an anti-abortion meme in response to the Women’s March events that took place over the weekend. They complained that the millions of women who participated in the events over the weekend were engaging in a “fight for death” (with “death” referring to abortions). However, the right to safe and legal abortions was just one of many issues that they were marching for; the Women’s March was not meant to be the antithesis of the March for Life.

You can watch Jessa Duggar share more details about her pregnancy during tonight’s episode of Counting On, which is titled “Could It Be Twins?” But don’t be fooled by the teaser question; Jessa has already revealed that it’s not twins.

[Featured Image by Jessa Duggar/Facebook]

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