Defying the trend: mothers of large families
By Francis Phillips, Mercator.
Book Review: Hannah’s Children: The Women Quietly Defying the Birth Dearth
By Catherine Ruth Pakaluk. Regnery Gateway. 2024. 400 pages.
We live in a world – I am thinking particularly of Europe and the United States, though its shadow is cast worldwide – where we are experiencing a dramatic collapse in population. There is an acute dearth of babies, the exact opposite of the doom-laden, much-repeated prophesy of an imminent population explosion.
Catherine Pakaluk, a mother of eight children, points out that “one in six people in the US is over 65 today, compared to one in twenty a century ago.” Writing as a Catholic, she laments that she has never heard a sermon in her Church “on the value of having children”.
Her book is a personal study of a very small 5 percent of US women: those who willingly choose to have five or more children within a society that has chosen the opposite. She and a colleague visited 10 regions and interviewed 55 women in this category.
Her subjects are college-educated, sometimes with advanced degrees. There is a balance of race, religion and ethnicity, and names are changed to protect identity.
It is highly significant for what it reveals about the relationship between religious faith and family size. The women interviewed – Mormon, Jewish, Evangelical and Catholic – are “different in kind”, not in degree, from other women, even women in their churches.
For instance, Catholic women today use birth control “at about the same rates as everyone else”. Pakaluk’s quest is to discover why these women, articulate, educated, passionate in their views, are so different from their peers “and what they think it means.”
The result is a treasure trove of reflections, joyful, exuberant, life-enhancing – rich in importance for society and for our civilisation as a whole.
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