It’s trendy for pundits and politicians to advocate for declining birth rates, but a new book tackles one of the most pressing global crises over the next century: depopulation in industrialized countries. Catherine Pakaluk, empowered by her faith and armed with sound economics, introduces us to the women quietly defying this trend in her new book, Hannah’s Children: The Women Quietly Defying the Birth Dearth. Pakaluk holds a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University and is a mother of eight. It’s an interview-based, qualitative research project with autobiographical insights. Throughout Hannah’s Children, we learn how to apply the economic way of thinking to the calculus of family size, a deeply personal matter with profound social implications.
The book’s title references the biblical Hannah, who deeply desires a child and promises to give her firstborn to God. She becomes the mother of King Samuel. Her faithfulness is rewarded, and she finds her purpose in motherhood, much like the mothers in Hannah’s Children. Pakaluk and her colleague Emily Reynolds hit the road to interview 55 women with five or more children in 10 American regions: if we can understand their stories, we can productively revise our theories about birth rates and population growth.
Today, a little more than 8 billion people are alive, with a population growth rate of about .91% last year, resulting in 73 million new human beings. That’s good and bad news. Humans are essential for human flourishing, so population growth is definitely good, as depopulation creates a demographic and economic catastrophe. The troubling news, however, is that the population growth rate is declining, particularly in wealthy countries like the United States and western Europe, as well as in South Korea and Japan. The primary source of population decline is falling birth rates.
Pakaluk reminds us of Thomas Malthus’ now famous 1798 essay, arguing that unconstrained population growth would always outstrip the food supply. Almost 200 years later, the apocalyptic book The Population Bomb by biologist Paul Ehrlich argued that the end was in sight and that nothing could be done to avoid the social calamities of overpopulation. Despite being wildly incorrect for 50 years, in 2023, at age 90, Ehrlich appeared on 60 Minutes, unironically doubling down on these claims.
Whether one perceives declining birth rates as positive or negative hinges on individual religious, political, and economic positions. People who view the world as a zero-sum game are terrified about population growth. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez raised the question in 2019 about whether it is “still OK” to have children given her assumption that things are getting worse—the climate is getting warmer, for example, and people are the culprit. On the political left, anti-natalists and pseudo-trendy “BirthStrikers” regard human beings as a blight on the planet and call for depopulation. On the right, however, the “natalists” are having three or more children and more likely are Republican voters, yielding “red-diaper babies.” In the U.S., family size correlates with voting policy.
The false overpopulation hysteria infects even our humanitarian aid. It assumes that poverty results in part from overpopulation and that poor women are perhaps too stupid to understand they need to reduce their family size. The reality is that they live at subsistence levels, and they have many children because child mortality rates are high relative to the rich world.
Macroeconomic trends matter, such as astounding post-WWII economic growth and the innovation of birth control. Nobel laureate economist Robert Lucas refers to the first demographic transition—the reduction in fertility—which occurred after the first Industrial Revolution, when economic growth surpassed population growth for the first time in human history. Pakaluk argues this was fostered by better nutrition, health, education, and family stability—in and of themselves all good things. She then highlights scholars who debate whether there was a second demographic transition in the mid-20th century, during which modern choices around family life changed again. Rising cohabitation and divorce rates began in the 1960s, for example, which altered decisions about the timing and quantity of children.
Pakaluk is keen to point out a paradigmatic shift: women went from adopting contraception to avoid a pregnancy to stopping contraception to start a pregnancy. One of her subjects, Hannah, puts the shift another way: Do we fit ourselves into the narrative of having children, or do we fit children into the narrative of self?
Relying on sociologists’ work, the book explores the influence of “expressive individualism,” where individuals increasingly reject the idea of fitting themselves into traditional roles in marriage. Part of that narrative is that children hold women back from fulfilling their career goals. I am reminded of my microeconomics class and learning about “corner solutions,” the all-or-nothing tradeoff. Women feel pressured to choose a prominent career and have no children or many children and no career.
Enter the women of Hannah’s Children, who defy the trends. They see children as gifts to the world, part of an eternal story that begins in marriage. These mothers defy simple caricatures and are from across the country; some come from big families, while some have no siblings. The most important common underlying variable is their faith: they are Mormon, Catholic, evangelical, and Jewish. They know what they are doing is different and even countercultural, but they don’t view themselves as revolutionaries and ask for no public praise. In their faith communities, they find solidarity and support in their decisions.
And support is definitely needed. There are no atheists in foxholes, as the saying goes, and motherhood presents profound “foxholes,” including postpartum depression, loneliness, feeling out of control, panic at the weight of the responsibility, and the sheer horror of failing at every stage of the child’s life. It is no accident that there are no atheists interviewed in the book. The astounding faith of these women carries them through the high costs of their decisions. Each of these women had challenging moments: some suffered multiple miscarriages, many faced scorn from strangers and were misunderstood even by old friends.
They all tell a story of allowing God to guide them and to reveal how their family would grow. That pushes them through loneliness, estrangement, and ridicule. Angela, mother of five and a college professor, declares that, while we have free will to make these decisions, “This is not your show.” She understands God to be in charge. The women in the study repeatedly disclose that God is changing them through motherhood, so they view the cost and benefit calculus differently.
Many of the mothers with large families surveyed continued to work and have significant careers, even if they worked part-time, including professors and medical doctors. Others were trained in graduate school and decided not to pursue their career upon having children; in every case, their husbands were partners in the decision to have a large family. It was also clear that, with each birth, the couples would reassess and try to determine if they should have more. Discerning this brought them closer in their marriages and closer to God.
Those women with advanced degrees knew that their professional peers generally discouraged or disagreed with the decision to have large families because it would restrict their careers. I will never forget telling my dissertation adviser in graduate school that I was getting married. He looked me square in the face and said, “That’s fine, but don’t you dare have a baby.” This is the advice that women are getting. That was 20 years ago, and it still stuns me. Did he give the same “advice” to his male students? Hardly. Yet this is a terrible idea, and scary for a young graduate student. In his twisted way, he was trying to help me. He knew that, statistically, getting pregnant meant that a student was more likely to drop out. The stories in this book help us understand that we don’t have to listen to that advice, nevertheless.
It’s not the case that you can either be an academic or have a large family. But Angela knows she would have written a book had she chosen to have fewer children; she was not a superstar careerist, but she has both the fulfillment of a large family and a career she enjoys. Publishing a book is less important to her than each decision to have another baby. As the great Thomas Sowell argues, “There are no solutions, only tradeoffs.” These women are deliberate and committed to the tradeoffs they make without being sanctimonious.
Economics is about understanding choices in the context of cost-benefit analysis. Pakaluk masterfully weaves into her story the economic way of thinking, bringing us back to the framework of cost, choices, incentives, and scarcity on a topic that, frankly, economics cannot itself solve. Family size is a personal decision, yet economic thinking helps us understand why this small but mighty band of mothers is defying the trends and why it matters. As they grow their families, they learn something that expected cost-benefit analysis can’t tell us, and it’s a counterintuitive lesson. Before choosing, we can only judge what we anticipate about the costs and benefits. We don’t realize the total costs or benefits until the choice is made. This leads to more of the corner solution world, where women feel like they must postpone children or not have them at all. Postponing children is risky because, as you wait, your fertility declines, and your ideal family size may over time become unobtainable.
Yet, the women in Hannah’s Children don’t look at children as merely adding expense to the family; they see the value they add over and above the costs, and they seem to agree that the benefit grows as you have more. We can learn this only through lived experience, which is why this book is so compelling. By reading their stories, we get to participate in and imagine not only a countercultural but also a counterintuitive narrative about large families. At one point in Hannah’s Children, the claim is made that three is the most challenging number of children to have! Three means you move from one-on-one to zone defense, but apparently, after that, it gets easier, as older children become involved with and cherish their new siblings.
These mothers helicopter less and give their kids more freedom because time constraints dictate it, allowing them to keep having children. Their kids are never alone and must learn to sacrifice, so they understand early that the world doesn’t revolve around them. Pakaluk observes that it also changes the parents. Living with young children for an extended period fosters “other-regarding virtues,” including “empathy, generosity, solidarity, and self-denial,” which are all necessary for the extended social order to function well.
Financially, raising a large family is difficult but not impossible; what matters is the willingness of the parents to make it work. They remark that it’s not a deal-breaker to move from driving a minivan to driving a passenger van and that feeding six is doable if you’re already feeding five. The incomes of the surveyed women vary; some are married to doctors and some to pastors. Yet it was not income that most persuaded them one way or the other; it was a desire to live according to God’s purposes for their lives. No one surveyed argues that this lifestyle is prescriptive for other families; they recognize that this is not for everyone. But they want others to know how wonderful it is. Moreover, to overcome the birth dearth, Pakaluk calls us back to our faith, not to some newfangled government program to stimulate births, because this is a matter of the heart, not a matter of policy.
Like the biblical Hannah, the women in this book find their ultimate purpose in motherhood and, with that, a joy they didn’t know was possible. They forgo extra vacations and fancier cars because this is their vocation. Unlike the Malthusians, who see people as problems to be solved, they know their children are made in the image of God, problem solvers, and essential to the future of humanity.
