Anyone who keeps up with demographics knows that birth rates in many countries around the world have now fallen below replacement levels. To maintain a population requires a minimum of 2.1 babies being born per female. But the birth rate in the European Union is today 1.53, in Japan 1.26, and in South Korea only .72. If that trend continues, South Korea may soon become only a note in the history books—with other nations perhaps following if their birth rates continue to collapse.

Right now, China and India are the world’s two most populated nations, but here again birth rates are below replacement levels and falling. Those who view the globe as overpopulated will applaud these declines, yet these birth rates will eventually, and perhaps sooner than we think, bring economic chaos and possibly international conflicts as countries run short of people and the resources they create.

Here in the United States, there are 1.3 births per woman aged 15–49. Hidden within this statistic, however, is an anomaly. Five percent of American women have families of five or more children.

In 2019, Catherine Pakaluk, a professor of economics at Catholic University—along with her colleague, Emily Reynolds of the Wheatley Institute, and two assistants, Mary Robotham and Sierra Smith—set out to discover more about these women and why they were bucking the trend toward smaller and smaller families.

Pakaluk and her team sought out and interviewed 55 American-born, college-educated women from around the nation who had five or more children with their current spouse, and they have published their findings in a new book, Hannah’s Children: The Women Quietly Defying the Birth Dearth.

Here, Pakaluk explains that government programs aimed at reversing this trend of low birth rates—paying moms to have babies, extended maternity leaves, and so on—have universally failed and will continue to fail.

Instead, the secret to averting demographic doom is demonstrated in the interviews Pakaluk and her team have conducted. In these interviews, we meet women from diverse backgrounds and religious faiths, and with various interests, but who also share several things in common.

Many of them chose children over promising careers, or, like one mother of six who is a part-time pediatrician, worked out ways to pursue both goals. All these women regard their children as blessings, rather than as stumbling blocks. All believe that their children have changed them for the better. Above all else, they share a love for their children and for the joys they bring. In Hannah’s Children, they share this joy with the rest of us.

To this project, though, Ms. Pakaluk brought more than an academic interest.

In 1999, the 23-year-old Catherine, a first-year doctoral student at Harvard, met, fell in love with, and married Michael Pakaluk, a professor of philosophy and a widowed father of six children who were still grieving the death of their mother. Those children today are grown and married with children of their own. Meanwhile, Catherine and Michael became parents to eight more children, two of whom are still living at home.

And to this wonderful book, I also brought something more than a cursory interest in motherhood and large families.

In Front Royal, Virginia, where I have now lived for seven years, large families are the rule, not the exception. Twelve-passenger vans are commonplace, and the church I attend, St. John the Baptist, swarms during Sunday Masses with babies, toddlers, and adolescents.

One young woman I’ve befriended, a 21-year-old also named Catherine, the oldest sibling of 10, plans on marrying in December, and both she and her fiancé want lots of children. Two of my good friends who are in their early 30s have four children ages 8 and under, and they are expecting a fifth next fall. Some ten years older, another friend and her husband have seven children. And in my own case, my four children and my two dozen grandchildren bring countless delights.

Based on the information Pakaluk has gathered from her interviews, she concludes we should turn away from government programs and “look to the strength and vitality of living religious communities” for encouragement in building our families. Given the right circumstances, certainly this strategy would work, as can be seen in my own community.

A final note: I am writing this column on March 8, my deceased mother’s birthday. She bore six children. To her, to Catherine Pakaluk, to all the remarkable women she interviewed, to my daughter and my daughters-in-law, to good moms everywhere, and to women who may have no children but deeply love and nurture those who are around them, I salute you.

You are the hope of this battered, old world.

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Image credit: Unsplash