Why Some Women Choose Large Families

Are there any remaining Brooklyn polycules that haven’t gotten their write-up in a prestige publication? Over the past year, magazines and newspapers including New York, the Financial Times, and the New Yorker have published pieces giving their audiences a glimpse into the lifestyles of the rich and consensually nonmonogamous, trying their best, it seems, to make polyamory “happen.”

No one should hold their breath for these highbrow outlets to start profiling homeschooling moms driving 15-passenger vans, or women who hit pause on their career or academic pursuits to raise a half dozen kids. Yet they, too, sit proudly outside the mainstream, every grocery-store trip or library visit a loud, visible reminder that there are values beyond meritocracy, vocations beyond the office, virtues achievable only through the denial of oneself. In an individualistic, anti-natal age, large families may be the real taboo-busters.

They get their well-deserved spotlight in Hannah’s Children, an in-depth, thoughtful, and empathetic work of ethnography by Catherine Pakaluk, an associate professor at the Busch School of Business at the Catholic University of America.

She offers a series of portraits of college-educated women who chose to buck the trend of declining fertility in a big way -- her subjects have given birth to five or more children. It is a select group: Roughly 4.3 percent of all American women age 40 to 50 have birthed that many children. Together with her colleague Emily Reynolds and assistants Mary Robotham and Sierra Smith, she interviewed 55 of these women, from various geographic regions and walks of life. Her subjects, Pakaluk summarizes, “described their choice to have many children as a deliberate rejection of an autonomous, customized, self-regarding lifestyle in favor of a way of life intentionally limited by the demands of motherhood.”

Pakaluk is a mom of eight herself, and the affection she has for her interviewees leaps off the page. She gives them the space to speak for themselves, with each chapter offering firsthand accounts of their decisions about fertility and family and of the trade-offs they made along the way. The women profiled in Hannah’s Children realize that their decisions may seem “crazy” when viewed through a strictly meritocratic lens, and they are clear-eyed about the sacrifices required. Their decisions are worth understanding from the inside.

As many analysts now agree, it is women’s increasing academic and economic advancement, not the direct out-of-pocket cost of raising kids, that is driving fertility downward. With more educational and professional opportunities available to them, time spent in the labor force is more financially remunerative than ever before. And in a richer society, with incomes and purchasing power rising, time away from the labor force becomes increasingly costly. As Pakaluk notes, the overall share of women having five or more children fell from one in five in the late 1970s to lower than one in 20 by the early 1990s, where it has more or less remained since.

These select few women still treasure the benefits of a large family over the direct and indirect costs of pursuing parenthood. Hannah’s Children tells the stories of fascinating, heroic women devoting the prime years of their lives to the hidden but priceless work of tending the home front. They are all religious to varying degrees -- Pakaluk notes in a footnote that “Muslim and atheist women were sought but not found for this study” -- though not all of them see their choice as explicitly religious in nature. Rather, they stress an openness to providence.

In particular, the discussions the book shares about fertility “plans” and “intentions” feel more honest than the common assumption in social science that pregnancies are strictly either “intended” or “unintended.” Pakaluk notes that despite their fecundity, these women did not reject birth control tout court. Instead, she says, she found “a rejection of a conventional attitude towards family planning, where children are fitted into our own lives, our own stories -- our own plans for the future.”

This may be one of the biggest differences between the mothers profiled in Hannah’s Children and the modal college-educated woman in America, who carefully takes measures to avoid pregnancy until just the right moment. “I think the conventional planning, wanting, and choosing is just a smoke screen,” a mom of five tells Pakaluk. “I think it’s an illusion. You’re not in control of things. . . . We just think that we have Nietzschean power over the world around us, and we do not.”

By rejecting the dominant contemporary paradigm of “planned” parenthood, the women featured in Hannah’s Children are exemplars of an older style of living (a few husbands make cameos, but this is a book about the moms). Prior to the advent of reliable birth control, sex was generally assumed to have procreative potential. But as Pakaluk notes, “in a contraceptive age, children will not come unless the capacity for childbearing is switched ‘on.’ ” The option to not participate in what came naturally to generations of married women is there -- and couples are taking it. According to Census Bureau statistics, fewer than one in ten married women in their early 40s in 1980 hadn’t had children. In 2022, it was approaching one in five.

Like an epidemiologist seeking the antidote to a disease in a population with natural immunity, Pakaluk began her research with the proposition that “the study of high birth rates could shed light on the problem of low ones.” The women she profiles would not be motivated to have another child by the promise of a larger child tax credit. And so, she argues, almost no women will change their fertility decisions based on fiscal policy: “Cash incentives and tax relief won’t persuade people to give up their lives.” She is decidedly cool towards the steps taken by governments to boost birth rates, correctly noting that some are expensive gimmicks.

But, for two main reasons, her move from ethnography to policy discussion feels like it skips a step. First, she is too quick to dismiss some examples of modestly successful policy initiatives. Australia’s baby-bonus program, for example, gave new parents $5,000 AUS at the time of birth and seemed to nudge fertility rates up a bit while it was in effect. That the rate went down again after the program was scaled back shouldn’t come as a surprise. For pronatal fiscal policy to have an impact, it needs to be salient, permanent, and, usually, costly.

And there are other ways that public policy, construed broadly, can make everyday life more accommodating of parents. As the American Enterprise Institute’s Tim Carney beautifully explores in his recent book Family Unfriendly, even the way we build our cities, design our roads, and set up our workplace policies can make life easier or harder for would-be parents.

The second problem with Pakaluk’s policy discussion is that her careful ethnographic work is not generalizable. The moms -- college-educated, with big families -- profiled in her book are double outliers.

In my analysis of the 2022 Current Population Survey, three-quarters of moms in their 40s with five or more kids did not have a college degree. Married women with college degrees and large families are maybe one out of every 100 moms today. They deserve the care and attention Pakaluk devotes to them, but that doesn’t necessarily mean their motivations for childbearing are representative.

In her concluding chapter she states her thesis most clearly: “People will lay down their comforts, dreams, and selves for God, not for subsidies. If the state can’t save the American family, it can give religion a freer rein to try. Religion is the cardinal family policy.”

Well, yes and no. The decline in birth rates is in large part a function of the decline in marriage rates, which itself is a function of declining religiosity. But Pakaluk’s preferred path to greater religious adherence is perhaps too influenced by her libertarian instincts. She advocates eliminating welfare-state functions to free up space for religious groups’ provision of education and charity. This is a debatable proposition that deserves more space than her book allows.

One doesn’t have to be a dyed-in-the-wool Marxist to hypothesize that economic growth, just as much as the expansion of government programs, has frayed the threads of social bonds and made religious belonging less vital than it once was. And if religion alone really is the only thing that can save the family, the fact that it is in broad decline across the developed world ends up being an inadvertent invitation to despair.

The women profiled in Hannah’s Children are not the ones we would expect to change their fertility decisions if the state pledged a couple of grand, or built more walkable neighborhoods, to help with the upbringing of their children. (They might find their lives made easier, even if fertility numbers didn’t budge -- a worthwhile goal in and of itself.) But a casually religious couple without college degrees, with one parent bringing home $55,000, might find such policy initiatives helpful when considering adding another high chair to the dinner table. Perhaps such couples need a similarly careful book examining their motivations.

The study of extreme outliers can be illuminating, even revelatory, in explaining their choices to a world that often doesn’t understand. Yet we shouldn’t extrapolate from their experiences too much when considering policy choices for families that are closer to the mainstream.

A set of portraits need not be generalizable to be memorable. And this book is most fundamentally a profound testament to a select group of remarkable women. Hannah’s Children stresses the importance of religious belief, self-sacrifice, and a willingness to be open to the workings of providence -- all depressingly out of fashion in the age of the autonomous self. Pakaluk’s labor of love does her subjects -- and us -- a tremendous service.