The Fertile Outliers

I interview Catherine Pakuluk on her *Hannah's Children: The Women Quietly Defying the Birth Dearth*

Event reminders:

1. I’m speaking for Natal-Con in Austin on March 28-29. Expensive, but I still hope to see you there!

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3. Meet-up in Austin at the Clay Pit at 1 PM Fri March 28. 1601 Guadalupe Street, Austin, TX 78701. Please RSVP in the comments. If my morning flight to Austin is delayed, I’ll post an update right here.

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In Hannah’s Children: The Women Quietly Defying the Birth Dearth, economist Catherine Pakaluk interviews high-education, high-fertility women. What motivated them to have five or more children in a era where educated women are far more likely to have no children at all?

The quick answer is “religion,” but that’s a gross oversimplification. Most religious women in modern America have ordinary, low fertility. But all of the high-fertility women Pakaluk could find were religious. 100% — and yes, she did call up an atheist society in hope of finding an exception. Her results are a cool probability lesson:

P(high fertility | religious) = low

but

P(religious | high fertility) = sky high

Pakaluk’s book grabbed me on page 5 with this candid passage. Why did Pakaluk herself have eight kids?

And it’s not because I’m a Catholic and the Church says that I should have a big family — because it doesn’t. One might describe the Catholic Church as “pro-natalist” because of its stance on abortion and birth control or the history of large Catholic families among Italians, Irish, and other immigrants. But whatever the Church teaches officially, Catholics nowadays use birth control at about the same rates as everyone else. And in my forty-seven years as a practicing Catholic, I have never heard a sermon on the value of having children. I have never been urged in the confessional to have more kids. There’s no doctrine that it’s holier to end up with more kids.

I was only a practicing Catholic for 16 years, and that was mere California Catholicism. But my experience was exactly the same as Pakaluk’s. It was Julian Simon and Judith Harris, not my upbringing or the Bible, that made me the natalist I am today. Which strongly inclines me to think that the best way to promote natalism is to bypass religion entirely. God is great? No, kids are great!

But then again… the fact that Pakaluk couldn’t locate a single educated female atheist with more than four kids gives me pause.

In my lastest interview, Pakaluk and I discuss all these issues and much more. Want to learn more? Come to Natal-Con in Austin in two days, because we’ll both be in attendance.