“Hannah’s Children: The Women Quietly Defying the Birth Dearth” is a unique book. The qualitative economic study of college-educated women in the United States who chose to have five or more children is the work of Catherine Pakaluk and her colleagues. Pakaluk is herself a mother of eight, step-mother to six, married to her husband for 25 years, and an economics professor at the Catholic University of America—in other words, a “compleat woman.” But, of course, that is not the primary reason for our interest in the work.
Each chapter of the book focuses on excerpts from one of the more than 50 interviews Pakaluk conducted with women who met the criteria of the study. What is perhaps most helpful about the conversational approach that Pakaluk takes with her research subjects is that she is able to probe beyond the conscious reasoning of the people she is interviewing. That is not to say that the mothers do not have reasons for being open to the children they have had but to suggest that their reasons are not immediately apparent to others, or, often, even to themselves.
We often mistakenly believe that we reach a logical conclusion and then proceed to some chosen course of action. Basic observation reveals that is not how human action tends to occur. “Can’t you just [some obvious course of necessary improvement]” reveals we tend not to proceed with quite so much logic.
Recognizing this uncomfortable fact, some people jump to determinism, believing that free will is a “myth.” Pakaluk, whose husband is a philosopher, is able to articulate better than your average economist the reality of reasons of the heart “which reason does not know” (to quote Blaise Pascal, as she does in the book). It’s not as though the mothers don’t have reasons for being open to children but simply that when confronted with a direct question about why, as one mother was, they struggle to articulate an answer.
The other reason the answer is difficult to give in a pithy statement of purpose is that, as Pakaluk shows through many different interviews, underlying the choice to be open to children is a coherent worldview with many assumptions about the nature of reality, the meaning and end of human life, and what the good life is.
When I heard about “Hannah’s Children” several months ago, I was nonplussed. Like many of the women around me, I felt like I could answer the question of why some mothers of faith have more than the average number of children because I was living it. Perhaps not yet as fully and fruitfully as some, but certainly on the way. Then, when I heard the book was a compilation of interviews and it was available at the public library, I was very interested. Interview-based books are some of my favorite, clearly.
The downside of the economic vs. journalistic approach to interviews is the lack of revision for brevity and clarity. It is not a condemnation of these particular women but a worrying sign of the broader culture that so many women with advanced degrees are so lacking in eloquence. The halting patterns of speech were ghastly and at times almost unreadable. There is no greater crime against the spoken word in our age than beginning every sentence: “So…” There were exceptions; most notably the woman referred to as “Angela” was articulate. What a pleasurable read!
The interviews were exclusively with women of some religious faith, though there are people who have many children absent religious faith (rare but nonetheless in existence). Taken together, the perspective gained from Pakaluk’s research demonstrates two helpful insights: 1) the argument is not fundamentally about whether to have children or not but about other and deeper questions of the human soul. 2) The inducement to be open to many children is not done directly but through the realm of ideas and example.
First, Pakaluk’s work illustrates that the fascination of the intentionally childless of those with children and vice versa is not so much about uncertainty with one’s own position as it is being confounded by a worldview so different from one’s own. It’s not so much that choosing not to have children defines a certain path but that going down a certain path results in the choice not to have children.
Also illuminated by this understanding is perhaps the predictive power of how many children people have in their peer group. Apparently, one of the most significant factors in determining how many children you will have is how many children the people around you have. Many of Pakaluk’s research participants were not surrounded by other large families; they were not determined by factors outside their conscious awareness. Additionally, those who spoke of living in a community with many large families spoke about how the common beliefs and experiences helped them to be open to more children. It’s not simply that knowing lots of people with many children leads you to accidentally have lots of kids, but that our ideas are shared with those around us.
Pakaluk offers a compelling explanation for why tax incentive programs to boost fertility have thus far been so unsuccessful and will likely continue to fail. A few thousand dollars is not enough to compensate people for the opportunity costs (especially for mothers) of having children. Additionally, the sacrifices required to bring children into the world are hard to bear without the example of other people who have done it.
It can be disarming when a dual-professional couple approaching 40 asks any mother around with more than one kid, “Should we have another?” They have so little context for their question, it’s perhaps understandable. But how do you convey an entire worldview and sense of purpose and eternity in a three-minute playground interaction?
In an interview, Pakaluk observed that in our national culture we have become “functional materialists.” This is undeniably the case. Many mothers with more than the average number of children have related the experience, minutes after giving birth, still reeling from a sometimes intense and dramatic event, of nosy nurses demanding, “Are you gonna have another one?” Is that really the time to be asking? Is that even a question that should ever be asked by a stranger?
What’s behind the question? From a materialist’s outlook, “lots” of children is a specific number. Turning away from the mainstream, childless culture of materialism, many of the women Pakaluk interviewed began their childbearing years with a sense that they were doing something. Though none of the women she spoke with had a specific number in mind, many mothers do at first. Having four might qualify as a “large” family for some, while having eight is the number to aspire to for another. They set out to “achieve” a big family.
However, the spiritual growth of being open to what God has in store for us—the unexpected blessings and the heartbreak of death and loss—means relinquishing the material expectations, the number. What so many of the women Pakaluk interviewed described was being open. Not a specific number, not achieving a goal, but being open to becoming a new creation through a path of suffering. What arises from Pakaluk’s interviews is an arresting portrait of the archetype of the mother, giving herself for others by being open to a power of creation that infinity surpasses her.
That self-lessness, when properly ordered, changes the paradigm of civil society. As a surprisingly favorable review in the New Yorker quoted from “Hannah’s Children, “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.”
Maybe, indeed.
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