Hannah’s Children: The Women Quietly Defying the Birth Dearth
By Catherine Ruth Pakaluk.
Regnery Gateway, 2024.
Hardcover, 400 pages, $29.99.
Reviewed by Nicholas R. Swanson.
In January 2022, Pope Francis struck a nerve during his Wednesday public audience. Noting that in many households “dogs and cats take the place of children,” the pope criticized the “selfishness” he sees responsible for a global decline in childbearing. Like JD Vance’s “childless cat ladies” comment, Pope Francis didn’t mince words. In a culture that prizes doing it “my way,” the notion that selfishness could enter a conversation about childbearing was an affront.
Beyond the controversy lay more basic questions about fertility. Why would a woman want children to begin with? In her new book Hannah’s Children, Catherine Ruth Pakaluk provides an answer. Seeking to understand not only what might cause a woman to want a child but lots of them, Pakaluk interviewed 55 married, college-educated women with five or more children. Her book tells their stories.
Pakaluk’s approach is distinct from that of a sociologist. Sociologists interview people and write books reporting on such interviews. But they tend to structure their books around hypotheses. Qualitative interview data functions as verbal expression of hypotheses evident in representative survey data.
Pakaluk, however, is an interdisciplinary-minded economist. Her book takes a narrative approach. Most chapters relay the story of an individual woman—her motives and the significance she attributes to her childbearing. The book is thus refreshingly open-ended, and the women become the focus. The women—souls, not hypotheses—are the objects of investigation. In explaining this stylistic choice, Pakaluk tells us that “[t]here are truths that cannot be captured by statistics, no matter how fancy.” Stories, even that of a single woman, can capture “the reasons of the heart” rarely gleaned by surveys, charts, and graphs.
Beyond style, a significant service of Pakaluk’s volume is to dispel a certain myth about women with large families—that they are uneducated and coerced by overbearing husbands to reproduce in large numbers. They didn’t choose this life is the narrative of this myth. Using what the late economist Paul Heyne dubbed “the economic way of thinking,” Pakaluk explains how women with large families are quite sensible.
The women pursue means that they believe will help them achieve their desired ends. Humans act based on expected costs and benefits. The cost of raising five, six, seven, or more children is quite high when one envisions the explicit costs of feeding, educating, sheltering, and clothing children.
Pakaluk emphasizes the notion of opportunity costs—what is forgone in choosing to raise children. After university degrees and years of professional upskilling, the opportunity costs of surrendering a great career or of making a sizable professional sacrifice coupled with the likely diminishment of vacations and free time make the choice to raise even one or two harder than before.
As the Nobel laureate Claudia Goldin has argued, the effect of increased women’s education and labor force participation has been to raise the opportunity cost of motherhood. Being a mother requires at least some sacrifice of time—and each additional child increases that sacrifice even if there are diminishing marginal costs.
Given the rising opportunity costs of motherhood, it is thus easy to understand why the average number of children per American woman today is just 1.6 and falling. Hence, Pakaluk poses the more interesting question: Why would an educated woman defy the norm? The answer given is not easy to relate to for those outside of a religious paradigm, but Hannah’s Children does an excellent job of leading the reader to an answer. Essentially these women’s unusual decision boils down to the Gospel paradox: “For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it” (Mt 16:25).
Pakaluk writes:
The cost of a child is the weight of personal sacrifices that a woman takes on in order to have and raise a child… [T]he meaning of their choice was ultimately a self-offering. They ‘paid’ for their children—bodily, emotionally, and spiritually—with their own selves. Mysteriously, they received themselves back in return, as other selves, more virtuous selves, more joyful selves—selves gained through loss. Dying to self, they believed they had been restored to life through a divine repayment.
In other words, the women discovered themselves—their purpose in life—through giving of themselves.
For all but one of the 55 women, this was explained explicitly on religious grounds. Pakaluk posits that her interviews revealed a startling thesis: a supernatural outlook, whereby self-sacrifice is assessed as gain, is perhaps the only way nowadays that most college-educated women are ever going to regard the benefits of large families as greater than the costs.
Pakaluk’s emphasis on self-gift as self-discovery also evokes Pope John Paul II and his notion of the Law of the Gift. John Paul II repeatedly emphasized that the human person discovers herself primarily through concrete service to God and other human beings, rather than self-care or service of abstract ideals. Happiness is the product of generous service to others. In this sense nurturing, feeding, and changing diapers are not merely pillars of parenthood. Viewed through a supernatural lens, those activities become the pillars of a life well-lived.
In a memorable passage in his encyclical Centesimus Annus, John Paul II described the modern predicament: “[I]t often happens that people are discouraged from creating the proper conditions for human reproduction and are led to consider themselves and their lives as a series of sensations to be experienced rather than as a work to be accomplished.” One gets the sense that the women in Pakaluk’s volume view their life in the latter way—not as a series of “sensations to be experienced” but as a work to be brought to completion. And that work is motherhood.
To be clear, Pakaluk does not denigrate women with small families or without children, and the women in her sample tread lightly when offering their thoughts on the shrinkage of families.
Still, Pakaluk offers an intriguing insight when she reports that the women she interviewed and their families are largely immune from corrosive social trends such as depression, hyper-individualism, and irreligiosity.
Pakaluk’s discussion reminded me of writer Mary Eberstadt’s 2013 volume How the West Really Lost God. Eberstadt provided a novel theory of secularization. She argued that the family factor had been overlooked, that perhaps the reason religious belief has declined in the West is because family life has declined. As Eberstadt put it, “[F]amily and faith are the invisible double helix of society—two spirals that when linked to one another can effectively reproduce, but whose strength and momentum depend on one another.”
Eberstadt asked readers to consider the empirical fact that religiosity is stronger where natural families exist. Whether it’s the desire for a foundational community-life for their offspring, the hope that religiosity will provide a firm ethical basis for their children, or the sheer otherworldliness of participating in the creation of new human life, many people are drawn back to church when they become parents. Likewise, from a Judeo-Christian perspective, since traditional family life is so constituted by acts of mutual self-giving—feeding, nurturing, changing diapers, caring for an ailing relative, it shouldn’t be surprising that family life would tend to draw members of natural families into, or back into, a tradition that imparts supernatural meaning to love of neighbor. The larger the family the greater these propensities would seem to be.
Moreover, the Eberstadt thesis casts doubt on other secularization theories, such as the common view that religious belief declined following dissemination of certain atheistic ideas promoted by elite thinkers like Voltaire, Nietzsche, and Foucault. For Eberstadt, crediting Nietzsche with the death of God gives him too much credit. The explanation is more bottom-up: religious belief has dwindled as families have become smaller, young people have delayed or forsaken marriage, and divorce has become normalized.
Pakaluk seems to agree with Eberstadt, that habits of behavior, not particular ideologies, are the main driver of social phenomena. Pakaluk writes, “[V]irtue is most deeply fashioned by the way we live at home, as children and adults…nothing shapes our doings more than the domestic society: the first society we inhabit as children, and the family form to which we give ourselves as adults.”
The women in Pakaluk’s sample suggest that their family structure—especially their family size—affects themselves, their husbands, their children, and their neighbors in a salutary way. Kyra, a mother of five children and a Protestant, says: “[E]very child I’ve had has humbled me more, has brought me closer to God. With every child I’ve had it’s softened my heart. And the softer your heart gets, the closer you get to God.”
Could more children be the key to religious and social revival? In an age of childlessness, that is a possibility Pakaluk’s book should prompt us to consider.
Nicholas R. Swanson is a PhD student in economics at George Mason University in Fairfax, VA. For full disclosure, he was a research assistant for Pakaluk while she wrote the manuscript and provided feedback on drafts.
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