Women Who Defy the Birth Dearth, By Mrs. Vera West

 F. Roger Devlin, author of the feminist critique, Sexual Utopia in Power (2015), has done a superb review of Catherine Ruth Pakaluk

Hannah's Children: The Women Quietly Defying the Birth Dearth
New York: Regnery Gateway, 2024. This is very helpful to those of us who are pensioners with a limited budget, that is, no money at all, for new books. A good review by some who knows the territory can be enlightening.

The central question is one which has concerned me and which I have written about may times at this blog, the birth dearth, the fall of the total fertility ratio in the advanced industrial nations to well below replacement level. This is seen in East Asia as well now, with South Korea having the lowest total fertility in the world, and China not far behind. South Korea has spent $ 270 billion to try and reverse this trend, but nothing has worked: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/3/15/south-korea-to-china-why-is-east-asia-producing-so-few-babies#:~:text=Despite%20high%20levels%20of%20debt,as%20childcare%20subsidies%20since%202006.

The book by Catherine Ruth Pakaluk details the problem of the birth dearth through a series of interviews of 55 women who had between 7-15 children. Almost all were religious in some sense. The book notes that the decline in births has impacted upon Christians as much as secular people, with the birth rate of Catholics, in general below replacement level. The common issue has been women working and facing the conflicts with motherhood. Most of the women interviewed in the book went from jobs to stay-at-home mothers and did not regret it. One female doctor had a child, then had another one to avoid going back to work, and then become a permanent mother.

Religion though was important for the women on personal level: "But the significance of religion for many of Pakaluk's subjects was even deeper and more personal. As mentioned above, most of these women understand their pregnancies as providential, and many refer to praying for divine guidance on the subject or becoming "open" to receiving another child (as opposed to deciding for themselves to have one). One mother spoke of a shift in mental orientation from "fitting children into a narrative of the self" to "fitting oneself into a narrative of childbearing," viz, the chain of generations. Such women consciously reject "an autonomous, customized, self-regarding lifestyle where children are fitted into our own plans for the future." Another remarked that the very idea of family planning involved the illusion that we are in control of our lives. In reality, while we have freedom of choice, we are never "directing the play," so to speak: no mere human being is. The most successful mothers are those who have been able to abandon control, or the illusion of it, and many experience a religious conversion or reversion along the way. They come to think the divine plan superior to their own narrow designs."

Whether of not such a spiritual revival can occur before civilisation collapse is a good question. I think these things will be decided by the will of God, over political policies. Politics, and economics, do not seem to have worked here.

https://counter-currents.com/2024/10/the-womens-resistance/

"It is uncanny how many contemporary ideals find their common denominator in the rejection of procreation—much of environmentalism, the liberation of homosexuality and other nonprocreative sex, careerism for women, easy divorce, "family planning," and the envisioning of human life as a process of individual self-realization, to name a few. Women whose grandmothers got married because all their friends were doing so now fail to reproduce for the same reason: the social behavior being modeled for them. Many find themselves crashing into the wall of menopause without having ever chosen to forego motherhood. Occasionally the proliferation of such women seeps into public discourse, as when Vice-Presidential candidate J. D. Vance was recently attacked for allegedly ridiculing "childless cat ladies."

The author of Hannah's Children, Catherine Ruth Pakaluk, is a trained economist. Most economic analysis of marriage and procreation follow the pattern set by Gary Becker: treating "demand" for children like a consumer preference that does not change much over time, and accumulating sample sizes large enough to permit statistical inferences. No doubt some important realities can be illuminated by such an approach, but it must also leave a lot out. Pakaluk and her colleagues took a qualitative rather than quantitative approach to the subject, collecting in-depth interviews from fifty-five women and comparing their stories. One thing she found is that the "demand" for children is almost never constant. In part this is because children are what economists call an "experience good," something

whose total cost and benefits cannot be fully assessed in advance. An example would be a vacation in a new place or a meal at a restaurant. You have a rough idea of what you're getting, but you must make the decision before you know the most important things about it. The idea that the benefits of having children turned out to be more substantial than expected came up frequently.

Motherhood transforms the "demand" aspect of women's decision-making process in all sorts of unforeseeable ways, making a mockery of economists' attempts to represent them by means of graphs and formulae.

The author also remarks on the difficulty felt by many mothers when faced with the "questionnaire checkbox in the doctor's office: Is this pregnancy intended or unintended?" Although the ubiquity of birth control means that women exercise more conscious choice than formerly, ambiguity is still the rule. Pakaluk's interviewees preferred to speak of becoming open to further children after a certain postpartum interval. Most understood their pregnancies providentially, as the intention of some power higher than their own will. This, too, makes the subject hard to grasp with the tools of conventional economic analysis.

An academic and mother of eight, Pakaluk recounts that many female students have come to her over the years for advice on dealing with parents pressuring them not to get married. These parents have poured money into high-priced tuition, and reckon it will be "wasted" if their daughters start families. "I can still picture the women with loving boyfriends, eyes brimming with tears, who have approached me saying, 'You have a PhD and a family. What can I tell my parents so they won't be upset if I want to get married?'"

It was perhaps this experience which inspired her to approach the problem of falling birth rates indirectly, through studying the minority of contemporary women who, like herself, have achieved high reproductive success. Hannah's Children is based on extensive interviews with college educated American women who have had five or more children—by their husbands, as it may not be superfluous to add. Their average number of children was seven; the highest, fifteen. Pakaluk and her colleagues tried to arrange a regionally and economically representative sample. The women were of various races, but about three-quarters were white.

These mothers do not come across as rebels: as the book's subtitle puts it, theirs is a quiet defiance. The author notes of one interviewee: "every time she came to a place where her remarks might imply judgment or criticism, she held back or qualified her speech." This was prudent: those cat ladies can be sensitive, as the recent Vance kerfuffle demonstrates. The proper attitude would seem to be that, while it might be unkind to mock spinsters, we are justified in wanting to see fewer of them: they do not appear happy, and their choices are endangering our people and civilization.

The proportion of American women bearing five or more children over their lifetimes fell from 20 percent in 1976 to five percent by the early 1990s, but the figure has remained roughly constant since then: we may have discovered the irreducible fraction of women who cannot be led to conform to an anti-natalist social environment. This might even turn out to be an evolutionary selection event that will leave future American women more oriented toward family and motherhood than their ancestors—at least if the country is not destroyed through mass immigration before the process is complete.

So what do these women have in common? The clearest pattern is that all believed in and practiced some form of religion, and only one attached no religious significance to her childbearing. But it is not so obvious how religious influence operates. As the author puts it: "Each of our subjects had a story to tell about just how their religious experiences influenced the decision to have so many children. The path was never straightforward."

The popular notion that certain religion denominations, such as Mormonism and Catholicism, promote large families is now badly out of date. Utah "nearly leads the nation for the biggest decline in birth rates in recent decades," and Catholic fertility sank significantly below Protestant levels already by 1980, where it remains. The author reports that in forty-seven years as a practicing Catholic, she has never once heard a sermon on the value of having children, and the current Pope has even remarked that women do not need to breed "like rabbits" to be good Catholics. Only thirteen percent of Catholics who attend mass regularly actually agree with the Church's teaching on birth control, and not one of Pakaluk's interviewees told her "I had lots of children because I believe birth control is morally wrong." In short, the influence of religion on fertility, while clearly important, is neither institutional nor doctrinal.

In part, religion offers community, and thus moral as well as practical support for struggling mothers. One woman put it this way:

I would say the vast majority of women that give birth in America don't have adequate support, physically, emotionally, psychologically, and medically. In religious circles there's more support. Childbirth is celebrated for us as a community. Women don't feel valued when they have a baby in the secular world. You become invisible. Now you are no longer this productive member of our working culture. People want to feel valuable, like they're contributing something important. And when the culture makes them feel that that's not what they're doing, it's very painful.

But the significance of religion for many of Pakaluk's subjects was even deeper and more personal. As mentioned above, most of these women understand their pregnancies as providential, and many refer to praying for divine guidance on the subject, or becoming "open" to receiving another child (as opposed to deciding for themselves to have one). One mother spoke of a shift in mental orientation from "fitting children into a narrative of the self" to "fitting oneself into a narrative of childbearing," viz, the chain of generations. Such women consciously reject "an autonomous, customized, self-regarding lifestyle where children are fitted into our own plans for the future." Another remarked that the very idea of family planning involved the illusion that we are in control of our lives. In reality, while we have freedom of choice, we are never "directing the play," so to speak: no mere human being is. The most successful mothers are those who have been able to abandon control, or the illusion of it, and many experience a religious conversion or reversion along the way. They come to think the divine plan superior to their own narrow designs.

This abandonment of control affects even so worldly a matter as family finances. Said one mother: "We're not family planning according to our finances. We're not waiting to have that set and then have our children. Our finances don't add up at all. If we were to try to make them add up, we wouldn't even have one kid." Such an attitude does appear to involve a certain leap of faith: if our ancestors had waited until all the financial risks of starting a family were resolved, none of us would be here. Many of Pakaluk's subjects remarked that expenses turned out to be a lot smaller than they had imagined, as well as mentioning unexpected turns of fortune that had made paying for children easier after they had them.

Another expressed the limits of the human ability to plan as follows:

I think the key thing for us was that we stopped trying to act like we could implement the ideas we had before we started having kids in our marriage after we started having them. We had this idea like it was going to be fifty-fifty. We were going to prioritize my career. And then none of that worked. It's just surprising how traditional things have turned out to be.

This lady discovered what is called "force of circumstance." It is the reason traditional arrangements are traditional.

The general point that no human being can control his own life applies to men as well, of course, but men's lives may be more shaped by intentional choice than women's, e.g., by the need to choose a career path. In recent years, however, women's lives have been deliberately reconfigured on this male model: "first secure a professional income, then secure a family. The path of schooling leads inexorably through the years when it would be easiest and most favorable to have children," as Pakaluk explains. Professional training is not normally geared to the part-time tempo most practical for young mothers, and where such options do exist, "women often pass them up for fear of being relegated to 'second class' status."

One of the author's subjects was an MD who did not realize until doing her internship that she hated medical practice ("I really developed horrible anxiety"). Her first pregnancy came as a relief, and she planned to take a year off from medicine to care for her son. But motherhood turned out to be such a joy for her that she—probably not coincidentally—conceived a little girl just in time to postpone her return to professional work further. Gradually, motherhood became her profession: "We just sort of kept liking the kids that we were having and liking having kids," she recalls. She ended up with seven, and never did go back to medical practice. Today she admits that in hindsight, she would not have bothered with her medical training. She is also grateful that she had her first child when still relatively young, pointing out that friends who have come to motherhood later have found the transition more difficult and experienced "a strong sense of betrayal."

The author comments:

Women who have been encouraged to look at career-building single-mindedly suddenly find themselves up against a gut-wrenching quandary they don't remember opting into—their desire for a home and children on the one hand, and the fruition of years of training on the other. Most of the time women split the difference, leaving neither incredibly fulfilled nor fulfilling. Mothering small children while working makes motherhood less enjoyable. And working while juggling family responsibilities taints the natural satisfactions of throwing oneself into a career.

In other words, women who try to live like men fail to achieve the characteristic satisfactions of either sex. As Pakaluk notes, subjective measures of women's happiness have been declining since 1970, both absolutely and relative to men. Mainstream scholars refer to this as the "paradox" of female happiness, assuming women have made plenty of "progress" since that time. They have: towards unhappiness.

The women in Hannah's Children found that the more children they had, the easier and more rewarding it became to go on having them:

Fixed costs, such as giving up a career or a second income, had already been borne. The variable costs, personal and lifestyle-related, became smaller. And the expected value to the family in terms of excitement, joy, and love seemed to grow larger with additional children. The added joys created a snowball effect.

At what point do the fixed costs give way to the variable costs? "Based on my interviews, it seemed to be somewhere after the second child and not later than the fourth." The cost of starting a family must be "seen as an investment, or a down payment on a certain kind of growth that one had to value for its own sake."

The burden of child raising is not additive, because the mother gains practical wisdom over time and because older siblings positively enjoy helping out. One interviewee surmised that taking care of younger siblings lets them feel useful, and protects them from becoming depressed, spoiled, or self-centered. Others predicted that their children's pro-social virtues "would be a benefit to their future families, places of work, and communities." Any loss of attention from the parents is more than made up for by the presence of brothers and sisters.

All Western populations are currently at below-replacement fertility, and many wonder whether any policy fix is available. Viktor Orbán's pro-natalist policies in Hungary represent one well-publicized effort. But the track record of such experiments is not good: government policies have proven more effective at reducing birthrates than at raising them. Cash incentives ("baby bonuses") seem to affect the timing of births rather than the total number: "women who intend to have children at some point rush to have children immediately to 'grab' the bonus." Thus, in Australia such a program resulted in an extremely brief baby boom followed by a sinking of birth rates to levels lower than the previous. Hungary's more aggressive policies have raised its fertility rate from 1.2 to 1.6; time will tell whether this is real progress or a "mirage of re-timing," as Pakaluk suspects.

The difficulty of encouraging fertility politically becomes clear when we compare the incentives available to policymakers with the actual thought processes of women deciding upon (or "becoming open to") further children:

Women make choices about having children based on "costs and benefits"—but not in the way we usually understand [i.e., not primarily in terms of monetary costs]. Rather, women compare the subjective personal value of having another child with the subjective personal value of what they will miss out on. Both sides include gains and losses. The choice to have a child is a value determination about the relative size of those gains and losses. The values will not usually be quantifiable for an individual woman or comparable across women.

The women in Hannah's Children saw the "cost" of children in the things they would have to give up: "comforts, plans, hobbies, status, a clean house, sleeping through the night . . . and [everything] else a woman might wish to do with her time, talents, and money." Pakaluk writes that part of a mother's self has to die, to remain forever unrealized, for her to place herself at the service of new life.

As for the benefit side, these women spoke of "how their children had saved their lives, saved their marriages, saved their souls. By their own accounts they had been saved from immaturity, loneliness, selfishness, and uselessness." Pakaluk heard "stories about babies who had fixed a family problem, cured a health issue [especially depression], or comforted a suffering person."

They believe their personalities and capacities have expanded. This expansion, in turn, somehow opened them to receive gifts of love and sacrifice from their own ancestors, gifts whose meaning had remained inaccessible until unlocked by their own choice to participate with those ancestors in reaching toward the infinite.

One mother described her children as a "key to infinity," referring to the endless succession of generations:

Everyone's searching for identity. Tattoo yourself, pierce yourself, take on another religion. [But] everybody's got ancestry. What a way to honor your legacy and your line. That to me is being a part of infinity, to continue a chain. So, what better a way to form an identity? No regrets. Not a one. This is way harder now than [life] was then, but I have inner peace in my life that I didn't have then. I was searching. I'm not searching now.

When we compare such language with the incentives available to policymakers—subsidies, tax credits, lengthening of maternity leave—the incommensurability ought to be obvious. A vast cultural sea-change has taken women away from childbearing, preparing them from earliest childhood for lives patterned after those of men. And since children are an "experience good," today's women literally do not know what they are missing out on. Many do sense, however, that something is missing from their lives, if only when it is too late.

The family, as Aristotle knew, is logically and historically prior to political association, so in looking for political fixes for what ails it, we are using something weaker and more contingent to try to shore up something fundamental. The natural direction of causation dictates that our family life ought to have a positive influence on our social and political lives, not the other way around. Many of Pakaluk's interviewees appear to understand this: they "believe that the sustained effect of living with needy young children for an extended period of life fosters other-regarding virtues necessary for civic friendship: empathy, generosity, solidarity, and self-denial."

Considering the religious dimension childbearing has for most mothers, we are led to ask whether positive change might come from this direction. As our discussion already makes clear, this will not be primarily a matter of doctrine or church attendance. Nor is a religious revival the sort of thing that can be engineered from the outside, or merely for the sake of increasing fertility. However, just as policy can discourage fertility even where it cannot promote it, a closer look reveals that policy can stifle religion even where it cannot foster it—and such negative interference can be politically done away with.

Freedom of religion is not merely the right to spend an hour a week in church: the education of the young was formerly an essential aspect of nearly all religious traditions. As the author writes: "The massive system of 'free' public education—a government cartel designed to compete against religious schools—represents a drastic violation of religious liberty." Fewer than seven percent of American children now attend religious schools, and their parents are forced to pay extra for the privilege. The author closes Hannah's Children with a call for

emancipating religious institutions to collaborate with parents in the work of education. Religion isn't truly free if it can't effectively assist families in passing on faith and tradition to their children. Just as muscles atrophy with underuse and bones lose their density, religion boxed into a tiny corner of private worship, stripped of all its other traditional functions, is no true religion.

Counter-Currents readers will be able to think of other high ideals that might inform the education of our young once the monopoly of a hostile state is broken.

On a personal note, this author has sometimes been criticized for overemphasizing the negative traits of contemporary Western womanhood. Pakaluk's approach of focusing instead on the women who are doing things right has much to commend it, and at least makes for a pleasant change. We can only hope that the proportion of such women will rise above five percent before our civilization collapses entirely."