Hannah’s Children: The Women Quietly Defying the Birth Dearth
By Catherine Ruth Pakaluk.
Regnery Gateway, 2024.
Hardcover, 400 pages, $29.99.
Reviewed by Sarah Reardon.
“We all come from divorce,” Wendell Berry once said, in an interview in Laura Dunn’s film The Seer. He continued: “This is an age of divorce. Things that belong together have been taken apart. And you can’t put it all back together again. What you can do, is the only thing that you can do. You take two things that ought to be together and you put them together. Two things! Not all things.”
While I read Catherine Ruth Pakaluk’s book Hannah’s Children, Berry’s words came to my mind, yet in an altered form. We all—figuratively—come from contraception, for this is an age of contraception.
We live in an age dominated by the desire to control and limit childbearing, much to our detriment. What should come naturally from human life and union has been hindered, and the result is a great decline in our culture. The decline only continues, and the future looks dim. Pakaluk’s book suggests that, as Berry says, we can’t put it all back together again. But what we can do, and what some have done, is to uncouple themselves from the contraceptive mindset of our age and begin in their own families to “put two things together” by intentionally bearing many more children than the average 1.6.
Pakaluk, a mother of eight herself, investigates the “birth dearth” through interviewing mothers around the country with five or more children. Alongside commentary and analysis from Pakaluk, Hannah’s Children showcases their stories in two sections, “How It Started—Motives” and “How It’s Going—Meaning,” inquiring into why the subjects were motivated to have large families and what their countercultural decisions mean for them and their families. Through her background in economics and the stories of her subjects, Pakaluk determines that our current birth dearth has to do with opportunity cost and that the “5 percent” who defy it do so for “reasons of the heart.”
At the beginning of the book, Pakaluk outlines the societal pressures that decreased the economic value of having children—like the shift from an agricultural to an industrial economy—and hints at what her interviews and commentary will draw out: that modern society has massively increased the opportunity cost of having children through the birth control pill and concomitant expanded access to education and the workforce for women, without any corollary increase in the benefit of having children. Some women, however, swim against the tide and bear the heightened opportunity cost of children, often giving up their careers, body image, sleep, time, and their very selves because they value children more than what they must give up. Pakaluk summarizes:
Most basically, the women in my sample went on to have more children because the value of doing so exceeded the value of not doing so. They ranked the next child more highly than the other things they could do with their time and resources. They embraced a scale of values in which something of tremendous worth was attached to having a child; that something was the kind of thing typically reckoned worth dying for: love for a beloved, love of God, love of eternal life, and the pursuit of happiness.
Pakaluk implies, in a discussion of birth control at one place in her book, that she is not a philosopher or a “student of human nature” but a “student of economic demography.” Yet philosophy underlies her work and makes itself evident throughout. Though she applies economic terms to her findings about childbearing—with language of costs and benefits—and draws conclusions about economics and policy, Pakaluk is fundamentally making, alongside her subjects, a philosophical argument about the value of human life. Together with the women of her sample, Pakaluk maintains that children are blessings worth living and dying for, and that having one more child is always a blessing. Beneath her conversations and analysis—and shared by subjects of a variety of religious backgrounds—is a very Christian conviction: take up your cross and die, and you will live. Give yourself away. Or, as Christ said and as Pakaluk repeats, “Give, and it will be given to you. A good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over, will be put into your lap; for the measure you give will be the measure you get back.”
The stories of Pakaluk’s subjects unfold the specifics of the giving and receiving. Her subjects represent a variety of religious convictions, life circumstances, and socioeconomic strandings. The stories are masterfully intertwined and compellingly told—truthfully, I found the book difficult to put down at times. The women spoke of all variety of transformations: the spiritual journeys which led them to their convictions, the losses that only furthered their devotion to children and childbearing, the benefits brought by giving their children many siblings, the alteration of their own identities from self-serving to family-focused, the softening of hard hearts and comfort to weary souls and delight to all that a new baby brings. I will let Pakaluk’s subjects speak for themselves, so I will not attempt to summarize their diverse experiences any further. Instead, I will examine a few implications of Pakaluk’s study.
One perhaps obvious implication is that men are instrumental in defying the birth dearth. Pakaluk focuses on women: that is her design. But the husbands of the women in her sample must also be remarkable, for they, together with their wives, adopted an attitude of openness to new life and a willingness to take care of five or more children. Such an attitude makes such men just as, if not more, unique amongst their peers than their wives. I understand that researchers are, by necessity, limited in their scope, but I wonder if Pakaluk might have been able to interview couples defying the birth dearth, not only women, and thereby present a fuller picture of this phenomenon. I would guess, however, that her findings as regards men would be similar—that, for both husbands and wives, those defying the birth dearth value more children more highly than what they might have otherwise have pursued, though this opportunity cost would certainly look different for men and women.
A central theme in Pakaluk’s book is that the birth dearth has to do with values and not directly with policies. As Christine Emba put it in an Atlantic article discussing Pakaluk’s and other books about fertility, the fertility crisis springs from a crisis of meaning. She writes: “People debating whether to have children seem to be seeking certainty that life is a good thing, that more life would thus be better, and that assistance, if needed, will arrive. Government policy can help with the last part. The first two assurances will most likely come only from another source.”
In order for our country’s fertility to take a positive turn, our country at large must become convinced again that life is a good thing. As Pakaluk writes, “The country got on the wrong track, my subjects believe, when it bought into a neo-Malthusian paradigm: that more people could ever be a problem—for a family, an economy, or a nation.” Our current anti-humanist culture attests only that people create problems, forgetting that people also solve problems, thanks to the rationality granted us by the imago Dei.
But the crisis of meaning that has caused our culture to forget the divine gift of life has caused further confusion. Pakaluk continues: “It got on the wrong track when a type of overly planned parenthood, bookended by deliberate sterility, became the norm for a marriage. No longer did we pray, like the biblical Hannah, to be set free from barrenness; we rather applied our cleverest schemes to give impotence the reign.”
Our current crisis of meaning comes hand in hand with the regnant contraceptive mind. As Pakaluk found in her study, it is not birth control per se that hinders people from having large families—for many of her subjects used some form of birth control, whether natural or artificial. Rather, the “control” aspect of birth control—the over-planning, the clinging to sterility that Pakaluk mentions—is destructive for our national fertility. The women Pakaluk interviewed challenge the contraceptive mind: they all displayed an openness to children and a posture of reception, though their specific practices looked different. Pakaluk writes, “Women in our study had adopted a lifestyle of never say ‘never’—even if they were actively avoiding children when we spoke to them. They often struggled with the language of being ‘done,’ which they saw as problematic.”
Solving the birth dearth and thereby saving our nation will require a large-scale shift away from the contraceptive mind—a shift in values, not in tax policies or incentives. Pakaluk emphasizes that the government cannot increase fertility directly but indirectly. Only by “taking a step back from providing human services directly, starting with education, and asking churches to become stronger by doing more,” can governments encourage people to have more children. Pakaluk reasons that if the government gives more freedom to religious institutions, religious institutions will better be able to do their work of encouraging people to die to themselves and accept God’s providence for all of their lives, including their family size.
Another implication of Pakaluk’s argument, therefore, is that the church—“unable to inspire the heroic sacrifices we need,” according to Pakaluk—has not been doing her proper work. As Pakaluk shows, people do not have large families because of religion, for this would be to confuse correlation with causation. Instead, women who choose large families do so because of how highly they value children. Many religious women do not value children quite as highly as Pakaluk’s subjects, as is evidenced by their actions. Certainly, religious families speak highly about children and recognize the value in human life much more readily than the average atheistic family. And certainly, many women in and outside of the church are not able to have as many children as they desire. But “deliberate sterility,” as Pakaluk puts it, is well accepted within many religious communities. And many women in the church do not, like Pakaluk’s subjects, “see their children as their purpose, their contribution, and their greatest blessing” or “take God’s first command in the Bible—‘Be fruitful and multiply’—to be a living rule and a true blessing, as fresh today as when it was committed to the ancient Scriptures.” Pakaluk has evidence to back this: as she recounts at the beginning of the book, Catholic and Mormon fertility are following the same declining trend as that of the nation at large. And recent studies have attested that the fertility of Protestants is likewise on the decline.
Pakaluk clearly states how the government should go about encouraging fertility: via religious freedom. Besides implying that the career-focused nature of our education system is a part of the problem that religious education could amend, she does not dwell much on how the church should go about encouraging fertility. What her book does do, however, is weave together through her subjects’ narratives a tapestry that itself is witness to the beauty of large families. I would recommend it especially to young men and women of a religious background. But any who look upon Pakaluk’s tapestry with open eyes will be encouraged to put together “two things that ought to be together”—whether that means reconsidering their own approach to childbearing or, if beyond childbearing age, seeking to impart to others the truth that, as the Psalmist writes, “Children are a heritage from the Lord, the fruit of the womb a reward.”
Sarah Reardon is a wife, mother, and former teacher. Her writing has appeared in First Things, Public Discourse, Front Porch Republic, and elsewhere.
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