I was recently contacted by a distant relation on my mother’s side of the family. He was filling out the branch of the family tree that included the children of my maternal grandfather, Henry Holtorf. He invited me to look at his work, documenting the family tree stretching back several generations to my great-great-great grandparents, Carsten and Wiebke Holtorf, of the small town of Schalkholz in Schleswig-Holstein in northern Germany. They were the parents of ten children and their second son, my great-great grandfather, John, emigrated to the United States in the 1860s.
As I traced the family tree from generation to generation, one thing immediately jumped out at me: the declining birth rates over time. Seven was typical in my great-great grandfather’s generation. In the next, three to four was typical, which typically halved again in the subsequent generations. That is, except for my own nuclear family. It turns out that my peculiar branch of the family are the first Holtorf descendants since Wiebke and Carsten to have ten children. And this got me wondering: Why?
There are many factors that have been identified that have contributed to the birth dearth. The transition from an agrarian to industrial to a service economy has rendered children more of an economic burden than an economic boon. Better health care also decreased infant mortality rates, which contributed to having fewer children. The effects of the technological revolution of easy and effective birth control were massive. And there are ideational factors like the rise and influence of second-wave feminism, the rise of expressive individualism, and the decline of chivalric masculinity. Still, even given all of these and other factors, some women still choose to have large families. And so a related why question arises, which could shed light on the former: Why do some women choose to have large families, effectively hearkening back to their great-great grandmothers?
In her new book, Hannah’s Children: The Women Quietly Defying the Birth Dearth, Catherine Pakaluk seeks an answer to this question by interviewing dozens of mothers who have bucked the demographic trends. Perhaps, Pakaluk postulates, studying high birth rates could shed light on the problem of low birth rates. Like the milkmaids who were curiously immune to smallpox, these women seem immune to the disease of antinatalism—and like the epidemiologist who studied the former to understand the smallpox epidemic, Pakaluk contends, the social scientist can gain insight into the epidemic of childlessness by studying these exceptional women.
The birth dearth harms women because we know that women tend to want more children than they have and that children boost happiness for women more than men.
While Pakaluk’s sample of women who have had five or more children was not large enough to be representative of that entire population, she interviewed women across a wide range of demographic features, including race, income level, region, and religion. Her findings are presented in a non-technical and accessible narrative intertwined with the mothers’ stories. Reading it as an academic and as a father of ten, I can say that this book will be of interest not only to those with academic training—including social scientists, philosophers, theologians, and clergy—but also for mothers, prospective mothers, and prospective mothers of more. And indeed there is much to be learned by young men, fathers, and prospective fathers as well. I would recommend this book be read by the whole gamut of any parish: single and dating men and women, newly married, veteran parents, and grandparents too.
As Pakaluk documents, the total fertility rate in America halved from 7 to 3.5 between 1800 and 1900. Except for a brief blip after World War II, the decline has continued to staggering new lows. As of 2020, that rate had fallen to 1.64, well below the replacement rate of 2.1. And yet, social science tells us this is the real problem: It is bad for nations as a whole, and it’s bad for women and children.
The costs to late modern nation-states are profound. With fewer and fewer workers supporting them, the marquis social safety net programs of advanced democracies—including in America old-age insurance programs like Social Security and Medicare—are on the path to bankruptcy. Consider that in 1940, shortly after Social Security was up and running, there were more than forty workers for every one retiree. Today, there are less than three workers per retiree. But a retiree gets the benefits, regardless of how many children he had. As Pakaluk explains, this created a classic free-rider problem, that contributed to the zeroing out of the economic value of children to the household:
The engineers of old-age programs seem not to have considered the fact that children—who fund tax revenues in the next generation—are a voluntary contribution that families make toward these programs. Given these conditions, standard economic theory would predict under-provision of children. Modern old-age programs that do not tie benefits to childbearing suppress the economic value of children to the household.
The cost of increasing childlessness to social welfare is apparent: If the trend continues, we will not be able to afford to pay for the social safety net. Pakaluk documents other costs to women and children. The birth dearth harms women because we know that women tend to want more children than they have and that children boost happiness for women more than men. On top of that, recent decades have seen alarming spikes in anxiety, depression, substance abuse and addiction, and deaths of despair. Pakaluk finds intriguing evidence that smaller households—childhood without siblings—could be a contributing factor.
In the face of such problems, one might think that massive new state support programs are necessary to push the birth rates up, since the choice to bear children, like all choices, is responsive to incentives. Yet, Pakaluk documents how in several countries where such programs have been tried, the effects have been small and unsustainable over the long haul. Perhaps such programs haven’t worked because they don’t understand the incentive structure for prospective mothers is not mere dollars and cents.
Since 1990, about 5 percent of women forty to forty-five have five or more children, a number that has remained pretty stable. So what is different about those who have big families? Why do they do it?
Pakaluk deploys an enlarged and ennobled rational choice or cost-benefit analysis to answer the why question. In choosing to have another baby, a woman chooses to incur any number of costs and give up all sorts of benefits. It involves giving up goods associated with identity (e.g., hobbies, career status, interests), lifestyle (e.g., hours of sleep, stress, health), consumption (e.g., more vacations, eating out), and status (e.g., fancier clothes, cars, etc.). To give these up, Pakaluk’s subjects reported, “felt a little—or a lot—like dying to self.”
Pakaluk persuasively leverages this account to critique an idea that has gained traction among pronatalist thinkers and voters, particularly since overturning Roe v. Wade—namely, to roll out massive new state baby bonus and subsidies programs. While such programs could help those already planning to have children—and there could be an argument in the order of justice for them—they are unlikely to move the total fertility rate much or at all because they assume incentivizing childbearing is a question of dollars and cents. Pakaluk largely sets to one side the public affordability problem (Where will the money come from? The U.S. national debt is $35,000,000,000,000, and we are already borrowing over $2 million every minute). There is a more fundamental faulty assumption behind big-spending policy prescriptions. In her words:
It’s not just a question of cash affordability. It’s a question of lifestyle affordability, career affordability, identity affordability. Do women and families want to pay the price of giving up the panorama of goods that will be sacrificed to have another baby? . . . It’s not that incentives don’t work. It’s that they have to be big enough to tip the scales—they have to answer the weight on the other side of the scale. When it comes to having a child, for a woman, that weight is her whole self. That is what she “gives up,” in a sense, placing herself at the service of a new life. What can answer the weight of your whole self? Rightly only someone you love as much as your own self: God, your spouse, and your children.
In other words, these pronatal women embraced a scale of values animated by a notion of love as gift-of-self. Each vignette in the book clearly teaches us that religion matters in a woman’s calculation to have a large family, precisely because it supplies her with a particular scale of values and vision of love. The theistic religions characteristic of Pakaluk’s sample grounded the women’s belief that there was something bigger than themselves—and that it was worth dying to themselves for.
When I tell people that I have ten children, a common response is, “So, are you Catholic . . . or Mormon?” While not everyone necessarily intends it this way, this response betrays an assumption that my choice can’t be explained rationally—it must therefore be due to some non-rational faith belief.
All of these pronatal women have a fundamentally Augustinian providentialist faith: They believe God and believe in him.
But it isn’t actually true that Catholics and Mormons and Orthodox Jews and some Protestants stereotypically have more babies. Pakaluk shows that religiosity, even measured with weekly church attendance, does not necessarily correlate with higher fertility. Neither is the difference that some religious folks are more “rational” than others. Nor that the pronatal-parents-of-many blindly follow the dictates of ecclesiastical authorities. The difference is that these pronatal parents value having more children more than what they would gain by not having them. And the necessary condition of that valuation is what I would call an Augustinian providentialist faith. As St. Augustine taught, faith is both believing what God has said and believing in God, trusting him with your life.
One hundred percent of Pakaluk’s sample size turned out to be committed to an Abrahamic faith tradition: Roman Catholic, Mormon, Jewish, Baptist, and more. And these women expressed an attitude of openness. Not only an openness to life, as the natural fruit of their marital union, but an openness to God’s will in their lives, specifically to God giving them children as a gift. And the openness to that gift comes packaged with a trust that God will provide for his daughters, both emotionally and materially.
Of course, the details of their faith traditions differ. One Mormon mother of seven recounted her prayers and assurances from her heavenly Father. A Jewish mother of nine expressed her conviction that God wants to send us blessings and that children are the greatest source of our blessings. But all of these pronatal women have a fundamentally Augustinian providentialist faith: They believe God and believe in him. They believe not only that God will provide, but that he will “repay . . . sevenfold” (Sirach 35:12–13). That is, in making a gift of self (in “paying” for their children by self-sacrifice), God gave them back their true self—less selfish, more virtuous, more joyful—and much more, including better marriages and healthier children.
Hence the fitting title of the book Hannah’s Children. Hannah was the biblical heroine who was infertile, but prayed earnestly to God for a baby, and promised to give him back to God. God hears her prayer and gives her a boy, whom she names Samuel. Her radical trust in God is evident in the song she sings:
My heart exults in the Lord;
my strength is exalted in my God.
My mouth derides my enemies,
because I rejoice in my victory. (1 Samuel 2:1)
And Hannah’s sacrificial gift of her child to the Lord’s service is repaid by God with abundant fertility, and she is blessed with three sons and two daughters.
Can Hannah’s spirit, which animated much of America as recently as my great-great grandmother’s generation, be more broadly recovered in our time? Pakaluk concludes that if it can be, it won’t be due to any child tax credit or parental leave scheme cooked up in Washington, DC. But government can foster the preconditions of flourishing religious institutions. How? By doing less in the areas that churches and religious institutions traditionally functioned, primarily education. As government education has expanded, religious education has contracted, and—like muscles that atrophy through disuse—religious institutions have enervated. In their current state, Pakaluk contends, our religious institutions are too weak to inspire the heroic sacrifices we need to reverse the birth dearth.
Doubtless many will find Pakaluk’s smaller-government prescription controversial. But what is uncontroversial is this: Pakaluk has written a wonderful book that paints an elegant mosaic made up of colorful and diverse portraits of many large families. She has done a great service by telling the stories of these heroic moms who carry forward Hannah’s spirit, each of whom is “like a fruitful vine within [the] house; [with] children . . . like olive shoots around [the] table” (Psalm 128:3). Their stories undoubtedly will inspire in readers just the sort of heroism we need to recover.