Hannah’s Children

Catherine Pakaluk, mother of eight, social scientist, and author of Hannah’s Children: The Women Quietly Defying the Birth Dearth, will speak at a BYU Forum next month. Below are links to a couple interviews.

Public Discourse
“I did not go into this project thinking about her, but at some point analyzing my data—we should call the narratives ‘data’ or use the sociological term ‘hearing data’—various aspects of the story of the biblical Hannah jumped out at me. I saw that her basic attitudes about childbearing and the meaning of life looked like the women in my sample. The biblical Hannah became, for me, an archetype to help describe what I discovered in the stories. Though barren, Hannah prayed to be blessed with a child. We all know what came next: she received her son, Samuel. What we all don’t know these days, however, is that God sent her five more children after she brought her firstborn, Samuel, to live in the service of God. The women I met generally didn’t set about to have large families—rather, they valued children greatly, like the biblical Hannah, and saw children as blessings.”

Catholic Review
“We are not looking at a phenomenon that can be extricated from what women and households began to pick a long time ago, even before you and I were born. Our family unfriendly culture is the result, not the cause, of fewer children being born. As children receded in priority for families, they receded in priority for society. Of course a bad culture today fuels the decline. But I don’t think there is a social or political ‘fix’ other than whatever can persuade women and households to see children as worth the incredible personal sacrifices.

“But many religious communities are doing exactly this.”

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I have come to view the ongoing drops in fertility around the world as fulfillment of a curse enunciated thirty years ago this month. As such, the only thing that will improve matters is repentance. Broken hearts and contrite spirits turning to our Heavenly Father. A solution that will not originate from any government or the mainstream of society.

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For another perspective on fertility there is the website of Luzia Bruckamp, a PhD student at the London School of Economics. Her perspective seems to be a thoroughly secular one of a young (but getting older) woman who would like to be able to have one or two children, and she finds even that basic desire out of sync with what her world is offering her.

“Finishing Education and Fertility”
“Another thing to keep in mind is that the best way to deal with postponement might not necessarily be to shorten educational trajectories but instead to make it easier to have children while still in education. It’s also important to note that social norms would have to shift as well. As long as it is considered weird to have a child in your early or mid twenties and nobody in your peer group is doing it, it’s unlikely that shortening degrees would decrease the age at first birth much.”