Three years ago, J. D. Vance, who is now the Republican Vice-Presidential nominee, said in a Fox News interview that America is being run by “a bunch of childless cat ladies.” This comment resurfaced over the summer, and celebrities such as Taylor Swift and Aubrey Plaza have recently declared both their love of cats and their intention to vote for Kamala Harris in the upcoming Presidential election. But the cat-lady memes have masked something deeper: women in the U.S. are having fewer children, just as women in other industrialized countries are. It’s a phenomenon that some refer to as the “birth dearth.” As of 2023, the average American woman will have 1.6 kids in her lifetime, and the number has been mostly declining for the past decade. The problems with this range from the short term to the existential. Social Security and Medicare are on track to become insolvent, even as boomers shake their coffers. Schools and universities can’t fill their classes. Our society is a pyramid scheme, with the young supporting the old. And the bottom of the pyramid is eroding.
One group that has defied America’s declining fertility rate are the women who have five or more kids. Since 1990, around five per cent of women, aged forty to forty-four, have been part of this category. Catherine Pakaluk, an economist at the Catholic University of America, recently set out to explain why. Pakaluk, who is in her late forties, is herself the mother of eight children and the stepmother of six. In the summer of 2019, she and a colleague interviewed fifty-five women across the country, all of whom have between five and fifteen kids. Some of their interview subjects were well past their childbearing years; others were in their thirties, perhaps with even more children to come. This past spring, a book about Pakaluk’s findings, titled “Hannah’s Children,” was released by Regnery, a publishing house known for its rightward bent. Although you won’t find the book on a national best-seller list, it has become something of a cult classic among conservative wonks and policymakers.
Arguments about fertility rates are often made in abstract economic terms, and for good reason: the abstraction is necessary to gloss over the topic’s natural awkwardness in a society where a woman’s reproductive future is generally considered a matter of personal freedom. To say that any one person or family should have kids, or more of them, is to violate a cultural taboo. But Pakaluk goes for it, making the case that having kids is good, not just for individuals but for society. She argues that the true damage of the birth dearth is not economic disaster but a distortion of our culture and politics. She, and many of her subjects, see a country hobbled by relentless individualism: people turning inward, pursuing their own happiness and success instead of investing in others. “Maybe what ails us is not our freedom per se, but something we mistake for freedom—being detached from family obligations, which are actually the demands that save us from egoism and despair,” she writes. This is the case not just for adults but for children, as well: Pakaluk points out that kids who grow up with lots of siblings learn to share space, time, and stuff; they must tolerate people who are different in opinion and personality. “The family works against individualism by asserting a communitarian reality,” Pakaluk writes.
Pakaluk and her subjects are double outliers. She focussed on women who not only have more kids than most Americans but who also graduated from college. A number of her subjects have advanced degrees; Pakaluk herself has a Ph.D. from Harvard. She picked these women because she wanted to understand the trade-offs between work and family. Becoming a mother to many children wasn’t something they defaulted to but something they deliberately chose. It’s an unusual choice: according to a 2021 C.D.C. report, the average college-educated woman has roughly one fewer kid than the average high-school dropout.
Notably, all of the women interviewed are religious—mostly a mix of evangelicals, Mormons, Catholics, and Jews. (The title of the book refers to the Biblical Hannah, a barren woman who begged God for children and eventually bore six.) A significant number of Pakaluk’s subjects went through a journey of conversion, whether they reached for a more observant life or rejected their own lonely single-child upbringings. They are self-consciously countercultural; they disliked the standard paths offered to educated women, and went after something radically different.
Perhaps because these women have already made choices that defy the norms of their class, they are able to state plainly the things that don’t work about the way our culture expects families to raise kids. For example, many of them assert that an egalitarian split in parenting duties betweens moms and dads is often impossible, especially in the early days of a baby’s life. “We had this idea like it was going to be fifty-fifty,” one mother of five with a Ph.D. says. “We had to figure out how to let go of all of that,” and how to “embrace things that seemed stereotypically gendered,” she added. The women are also clear-eyed about the fact that pursuing advanced degrees and successful careers makes it harder to have a family. “College, medical school, law school, and the like don’t require lower fertility, they just eat up childbearing years,” Pakaluk writes. “The biological deck is stacked against you.” Even those who are able to juggle the demands of schooling, career, and family may eventually hit the limit of their ability to parent how they want. Pakaluk interviews one mother who had four of her five children, including twins, while pursuing tenure. The mother wistfully describes waiting until her mid-forties to have her fifth baby because she was so stressed out by her job. Children “need their mothers,” she says. “I don’t think they need a giant institutionalized day-care system. I don’t think they need a preschool. I think they need their mothers. That’s it.”
Like that mother, many of the women interviewed kept working after having kids: one is a part-time pediatrician, another manages the schedule for a cleaning company while her music career is on hold. But, even for the women with careers, having many children offered them tacit permission to let go of certain notions of success. “It’s wonderfully freeing,” says one mother, a former corporate lawyer with six kids. “It’s the opposite of what the culture would tell you, I think, which is that [this] is a cage.” For these women, giving up their individual freedom by having kids led them to a deeper sense of purpose and joy. As Pakaluk writes, “My subjects 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.”
Some readers might find Pakaluk and her subjects overly judgmental toward other women. Pakaluk explains that this isn’t her intention. “My full and real view is that women with much smaller families or no children at all may share the purposes, values, and virtues of the women I interviewed, even though life did not hand them the same opportunities,” she writes. She points to the body of academic literature showing a “fertility gap” alongside the birth dearth: women in developed countries have, on average, fewer children than they’d like, suggesting that the size of their families may not be a direct translation of their values. This is a group that the cat-lady discourse seems to miss: women who don’t have the families they dream of, whether because of infertility or financial struggles or because they haven’t found the right partner. And yet some judgment is unavoidable: the fact is that a growing number of Americans don’t want kids, and most of them don’t want a minivan full, even if it were affordable and tenable. Most Americans do not want to live the way Pakaluk and her subjects do.
Pakaluk clearly thinks that, as a culture, it is good to encourage young women to have families. The problem is how. She is skeptical of the kinds of family policies that progressives and pro-family conservatives advocate, such as increases to the child tax credit or baby bonuses from the government. To Pakaluk, these proposals ignore the fundamental reasons that people have kids, and they also downplay the trade-offs involved. “These programs take childbearing decisions to be a function of cash flow, of balancing the household budget. But that is strictly speaking, false,” she writes. “A couple must consider the entire bundle of the costs of having a child—and that bundle includes what else a woman might wish to do with her time, talents, and money.” Having kids is not just a matter of having less money to spend; it also involves categorical shifts in life style, career prospects, and one’s sense of self. “Such programs may boost morale for families,” Pakaluk writes. “They may boost the popularity of politicians. But they will not boost the birth rate.”
Her suggestion? Religion. “Make it easier for churches and religious communities to run schools, succor families, and aid the needs of human life,” she writes. Her subjects describe their trust in God as one of their primary motivations for having a kid, and then another and another. “People will lay down their comforts, dreams, and selves for God, not for subsidies,” Pakaluk argues. To this end, she favors ending government restrictions on religious groups, particularly when it comes to education. “If the state can’t save the American family,” she writes, “it can give religion a freer rein to try.”
Her proposal—make more babies by making Americans more religious—is unlikely to persuade the highly educated women she seems to be writing for, and certainly won’t appeal to the defiant cat-lady set. This is an ambiguity in Pakaluk’s project: Is her goal to solve an intractable global problem or simply to persuade more people to follow her path? Either way, Pakaluk might have trouble achieving her ends. The world view that motivated her to take on a big family alongside her career puts her on the opposite side of an almost unbridgeable divide from most college-educated women. She doesn’t believe in using artificial birth control, and suggests that abortion devalues human life. She thinks “old-age programs,” such as Social Security, should either be abolished or that women who have more children should get bigger payouts. She also thinks that universal paid family leave would be “counterproductive”: “Working while raising a young child makes motherhood less pleasant, not more,” she writes. It’s emotionally tough to hand your baby to a babysitter or day-care worker, she argues, and it’s draining to juggle calendars for older kids. Encouraging mothers to stay in the workforce with paid leave may make them less likely to have lots of kids. “Few people arduously holding down a demanding job at the same time as parenting a young child will want to do that more than once or twice,” she writes.
When it comes to family, Pakaluk thinks that young women spend too long on the slogging path from kindergarten through college and graduate school, trying to establish themselves professionally during their best baby-making years. It’s “the story of growing up female in America that’s like, you can be and do anything,” says one mother of six who decided to become a stay-at-home mom after completing her medical residency. “When you’ve accomplished all of the goals that are time sensitive, then you can do these other things,” like starting a family. Some of the women who pursue professional achievement end up trying to get pregnant in their late thirties and forties, however, and may not be able to do so without medical assistance. At that point in their lives, the transition to parenthood can also be a jarring adjustment, this mother points out—one day, they’re in control of their successful careers, and the next they’re facing a totally new way of being. “There are some things just best done young,” the mother says. “Sometimes having kids is one of those.”
Pakaluk seems to wish she could sit down with all the ambitious young women at top colleges and dissuade them from what she and her subjects see as a devastating lie: that it’s worth it to delay having kids, or to have fewer kids, or to not have kids at all in order to pursue personal happiness and professional success. Women, she suggests, should take their future family lives as seriously as they take their careers, and they shouldn’t put off the former for the sake of the latter. For a career economist, it’s surprising that her solution to America’s falling birth rates is not a matter of policy but culture. The fact that she is such an exception in the communities she wishes to change shows how difficult that culture shift may be. ♦