Part I: Why is America's birthrate declining?

Hear On Point's mini-series on the declining birth rate in the United States.

We're not looking at economics, or education, but another aspect of parenthood highlighted and debated in two new books.

Today, On Point: Do children bring a unique sense of meaning to life?

Catherine Ruth Pakaluk, associate professor of social research and economic thought at The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. Author of “Hannah’s Children: The Women Quietly Defying the Birth Dearth.”

Excerpt from Hannah’s Children: The Women Quietly Defying the Birth Dearth. Not to be reprinted without permission of the publisher. All rights reserved.

Part I

MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI: In March, Arizona Rep. Republican David Schweikert gave voice to a growing concern.

DAVID SCHWEIKERT: If I came to you right now and said, let's come up with a way to stabilize Social Security, let's stabilize Medicare, it's moral. It's our moral obligation. We made a social contract in this society.

Okay. We've got a problem and it's all something almost no one here ever talks about. We're not having children. United States fertility rates have collapsed.

CHAKRABARTI: That was Schweikert on the House floor. Now, he's not alone. Declining birth rates have been an issue for lawmakers, policy advisors, and economists for some time.

That's because birth rates in the United States have been falling for decades. In 1960, women in the U.S. had an average of 3.6 children each. In 2023, that number was 1.62 children, less than half. And that's lower than the 2.1 children per woman replacement birth rate, as stated by the National Institutes of Health.

And more and more people these days are also deciding not to have kids at all. Back in 1976, 1 in 10 women had no biological children. Today, that number is 1 in 7. But of course, it's more complicated than that. Because let's be clear, it does not mean that the U.S. population is shrinking. It continues to grow.

Because of several factors, including what's known as population momentum. That means that just because birth rates decline, it doesn't mean that growth immediately falls to zero. Now, there's also the fact that huge baby boomer generation, that massive population bubble, they have children and grandchildren who are still having babies.

So that will carry on the population growth for some time. And third, and perhaps most importantly, immigration. In January, the Congressional Budget Office released a report that found that immigration is almost entirely responsible for keeping the U.S. population steady or growing through 2054. That makes immigration an even more important economic boon for this country.

More workers means more tax revenue and more long-term support for programs like Social Security and Medicare. But it also makes immigration, and the U.S. 's declining native-born birth rate, a deeply polarizing political issue. But let me clarify. When I say native born, Americans of all races.

Because as far back as 2018, birth rates fell most precipitously among Black and Hispanic Americans, according to the CDC. So what is driving falling fertility rates isn't quite clear. Many policy makers have attributed the decline to the cost of raising children. Lack of social support for families, and mothers especially.

Or inconvenience. Or anxieties around major things like climate change, war, and political instability. But what if the reason birth rates are so low is because of something much simpler? That we've changed as a culture. And perhaps, for many people, it's simply not as meaningful to have children as it once was.

So today and tomorrow, we're going to take a look at that thesis. Because it's the undercurrent in two new books about raising children in America. And the books, by the way, come at that question from very different angles. So today, in part one of our informal mini-series, which regular listeners know we love to do here at On Point, Catherine Ruth Pakaluk joins us.

She's an associate professor of social research and economic thought at the Catholic University of America in Washington. And she interviewed 55 women who were bucking the current trend of that declining birth rate and having more children than average. And for some many more. And she catalogs what she found in the lives of those women in the new book, Hannah's Children: The Women Quietly Defying the Birth Dearth.

Professor Pakaluk, welcome to On Point.

CATHERINE RUTH PAKALUK: Hi, Meghna. It's really great to have you.

CHAKRABARTI: And I promise that we will dig in deeply into what you found and wrote about in your book. But, we're having this conversation in the middle of a a very divisive political moment regarding the judgments that people are passing on women who choose to have children or don't.

So I want to just hit that head on, right here at the top with you. So of course, here's a Republican vice-presidential candidate, JD Vance, who has really basically said that women who choose not to have children have no stake in the future of this country. And here's how he said it on July 29th, 2021, on the Tucker Carlson Show.

JD VANCE: We're effectively run in this country via the Democrats, via our corporate oligarchs, by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they've made. And so they want to make the rest of the country miserable too. And it's just a basic fact. You look at Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, AOC, the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children.

And how does it make any sense that we've turned our country over to people who don't really have a direct stake in it? I just wanted to ask that question and propose that maybe if we want a healthy ruling class in this country, we should invest more. We should vote more. We should support more people who actually have kids. Because those are the people who ultimately have a more direct stake in the future of this country.

CHAKRABARTI: JD [Vance], July 29th, 2021, and to be clear, Vice President Kamala Harris actually is a mother. She's a stepmother of two children.

So Harris, so Vance there, you know what, I said JD Harris before, forgive me, JD Vance is clearly making the implication that women who don't have biological children, not only do they not have any stake in the future of the country, according to him, but he is passing judgment on their value, their personal value to the country now. And when we talk about meaning, Professor Pakaluk, just respond to that take on the meaning of a woman's life.

PAKALUK: Yeah, I think it's impoverished and obviously it's, as you said, it's divisive and it kind of fosters the kind of division that I think we should probably avoid, but I want to point out the trend.

What Vance is doing, and I think a lot of other politicians like him are doing right now is identifying this very big problem. The one that you outlined at the beginning, we have these sort of entitlement programs that are about to become bankrupt and we can't figure out, basically, like all the king's horses and all the king's men cannot figure out why people aren't having kids.

And what I think the political arena asks us to do is identify bogeymen. Right, so it's going to be values or culture or childless cat ladies. But that actually is a way of just avoiding the real basic question, which is why people are not choosing the families that they're having.

CHAKRABARTI: When you say impoverished though, can you please tell me a little bit more what you mean by that?

Because that seems like while both a critical term in evaluating Vance, it also seems a little bit generous to be honest, because more people had a more stronger response than impoverished.

PAKALUK: What I'm hoping to do here is not embrace that same mentality of divisiveness, but yeah, but it's shallow.

So by impoverished, it's shallow. And it's not taking seriously the lives and the real kind of hard choices that I think women and couples have been making, and are making. And so in a sense, it's the kind of this macro view that looks to blame some sort of structural deterministic process and doesn't ask carefully, right?

What's at the heart and soul of the decision-making process about having children. We all know that's not an easy decision-making process and people don't arrive at their choices lightly. So that's what I mean by impoverished.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. I appreciate you going through that with me. Because again, we just can't have this conversation without addressing that head on.

Because to your point, the choices that women make, they've long been political, but they've become so much more political in recent years that I think it just makes it challenging to have any conversation about childbearing without then fundamentally getting to the question that you explore in your book Hannah's Children.

So I presented this idea that the meaning that people get, and let's be frank, we're talking about women in this context, from having biological children. Let's define that. In your book, with the women you talked with, how did they define the sense of meaning they got?

PAKALUK: So it's much easier to define meaning through a particular story.

And act.ately subjective. It's something that each person crafts for herself or himself through some kind of process of life experience, and then reflecting on choices we've made and telling stories about them.

So actually, I think it's difficult to find meaning as a general term, across the women in my sample, except to say that each of them had a really interesting story to tell about how they had prioritized children in a way that made sense for them. And so those stories are very interesting.

What I tried to do in pulling the stories together was work through the sorts of questions people might have, does everybody who decides to have more children than normal, are they all people who come from large families? And it turns out the answer is no, right? Some people did and some people didn't.

Are they all people who, let's say, are just mindlessly doing what other friends of theirs are doing or other members of their particular church, and I think the stories speak for themselves. There's no mindlessness here. There's a really interesting story. So working through those pieces, the common factor, of course, was that there's a reason.

So in a sense, I think it's one way to think about. Meaning is do you have a compelling story that you can tell about why you made this particular choice? And what I found was gee, lo and behold, this really interesting group of women have really interesting stories to tell. And generally, there's stories that, you know, haven't been told.

So it's an honor to do that.

CHAKRABARTI: So we have to take a quick break in about a minute here. So we'll dive into the stories, specifically after that break. But I just want to ask you, to describe to listeners, when we talk about children, women who are bucking the trend, you interviewed women who are having five or more children.

PAKALUK: That's right. Five or more children. And maybe one way to really put the point for bucking the trend is that these are generally people who had decided not to go through the work life balance. They just said, you know what, this is most important to me.

So I'm going to fit my work and passions into this life of motherhood. So it's a way of life rather then. And so maybe that frames for the listeners how different this is.

Part II

CHAKRABARTI: Before we get back to the women that you spoke with, I'm a stickler for context, so I just wanted to add a little bit of context to when you said earlier that Social Security is going bankrupt. According to the Social Security Administration itself, the trust fund, the Social Security Trust Fund, indeed, will be, they say, will be exhausted at around 2037.

PAKALUK: That's right.

CHAKRABARTI: But they say taxes, current taxes, will continue to be able to pay for 75% of benefits. And the SSA recommends that a slight increase in payroll taxes could end up continuing the funding for Social Security in its entirety. But I just wanted to say, just clarify that you're talking about --

PAKALUK: The trust fund.

Yeah, absolutely.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. So tell me the story of one of the women that you interviewed for your book. Pick anyone that you like, that you think really describes a sense of meaning that they got from having more five or more children.

PAKALUK: Sure. So I'll describe Hannah. She's one of my favorites, although they're like your kids, you can't pick, but Hannah was and these are pseudonyms, but Hannah grew up in a normal reformed Jewish household in the Northeast and fairly secular household.

Wasn't even sure she wanted to get married at one point in her life. And towards the end of college, she went on this kind of journey. She just was searching for the meaning of things. She talks about moving to Hawaii and growing dreadlocks and meditating on the beach and after a series of kind of empty searches, a friend invited her to move to Israel and find out more about her religious roots or her ethnic roots, really.

And in Israel, she met a charismatic rabbi, and she met a whole bunch of other young people. Similarly, on a journey, she met her husband, her future husband, and she describes it as, I came to see in this community that having children was the key to this infinity that I was looking for in her meditative years.

She was looking to be connected to something. Infinite something, deeply meaningful and purposeful and so she became convinced in this community that having children would be the key to that infinity. And she puts it something like, you're going to be connected in this link, in this link, it's a part of a chain going all the way back to Noah and to Adam, and what is more meaningful than that? What's a better identity to have than that? And so she says something like, for me, that was it. Nothing else was going to do that. And so then she describes, of course, the details of coming back to the States and building her family.

But that's the type of story. There are many different versions of that story.

CHAKRABARTI: That resonates so powerfully with me. I'm the mother of two. So I'm not bucking the trend here, I guess I'm part of the trend. But the sense of being connected to the infinite, right?

There was one day, it was a couple of months after I went back to work following the birth of my first child. And I remember I was walking home, and I had this almost out of body experience where I was just thinking about my infant. And I suddenly just felt this internal sense of, Oh, now I know how the experience of the continuation of the universe and my part in it.

It was very powerful. So I really understand that almost unique sense that a person can experience. But I didn't feel the need to have five or more.

PAKALUK: (LAUGHS)

CHAKRABARTI: So there has to be something more than just that infinite. Why have more children if you can have that same experience with one or two? In a sense, I think that's the subjective nature of this. I think I wanted to take, I want to take these stories at their word. Why have more? I think, let me try to give you some of the language that I think some of the women used. Why not have another friend, right?

So I think they would say this is the kind of, this is a basic good, that for me, it's like friendship. It's like other types of goods where I don't feel that I would be done with this. I would like to have more of that joy and that purpose. So in a sense, it's hard to question it, but how to question it in the context.

And but I certainly want to stress that it wasn't in any case that I discovered, it wasn't a rejection of other good things you could do. Many of the women that I talked to were working full time, many of them working part time, and many of them had chosen to stay home. In terms of just unearthing an interesting population of people, the common factor wasn't not knowing what else to do with their time.

I want to get that on the table right at the beginning. I think maybe one way to put it, and now I'll use the language of Hannah's best friend, Esther. So Esther and Hannah were interviewed together and Esther said something like, the 3 big blessings that God wants to send us are health and wealth and children and the greatest of these is children.

And so she said something like, I really believe that. And that God isn't out to trick us and send us packages that are tricky, that a child is going to be a blessing and that you couldn't have too many children, right? That you couldn't have too much health, and you couldn't have too much wealth and you couldn't have too many children.

Obviously, that's a very unusual point of view today. And then that's exactly what I want to highlight. So I think that language, which is obviously very biblical, coming out of a particular biblical tradition, but it resonated as okay, that's something we can identify. This is why it's different.

It's different from, maybe the more normal trend. These are people who look at the goodness of life and think you can't have too many children, just like you can't be too rich or too skinny, right? As the saying goes, right? Yeah, maybe that's the best way to put it.

CHAKRABARTI: It is possible to be too skinny, I might say.

PAKALUK: Yeah, I think you're a hundred percent, right.

CHAKRABARTI: But professor this was in Hannah's story, she explains to you about her deep relationship with her Jewish faith, but for all of the women that you interviewed.

It seemed like the one, even though they came from very different backgrounds, very different levels of education, for example, very different careers or not careers, as you say, we're not making any judgment on their choices.

PAKALUK: No. Not at all.

CHAKRABARTI: The one thing that links them all is religious faith.

PAKALUK: Yes.

Yeah. And I would say religious faith in a particular tradition. I would like to say there was one case, my outlier in a sense, that's how you, that's how you refine what it is that you found in your findings. One of the moms that I talked to, her desire to have a large family really came out of wanting to do something for her husband.

It was something he really wanted. I didn't interview the husband, of course, so I can't pass any judgments on his wish to have children. But still, the point is, she had a reason to have those children, and that reason was deeply meaningful to her. Something that her husband really loved, and she was enjoying, if she wasn't enjoying it, she wouldn't have gone along with it. And, you can read her testimony, but yeah, except for Lauren. All of the women, all the other women I talked to had, we'll say a biblical or a religious way to explain how they made sense out of the goodness of their childbearing.

CHAKRABARTI: You called it testimony.

Is that what it sounded like to you for all of these women?

PAKALUK: Yeah, absolutely.

CHAKRABARTI: Why is that important?

PAKALUK: I think that it's important because I was probing deeply to find out what is it that you believe about having children? So if it's fair, a testimony is right. It's a kind of description of this is what I believe, those memes that are going around.

With the guy with his hand raised, I'm not even sure what the source of that meme is, but it's great. And you're in this really privileged moment in an interview like this, where you really get to dig into, to find out what it is that the people believe, what drives them.

And so it did strike me as a kind of testimony. And as much as possible, I try to present their words without as much interruption as possible.

CHAKRABARTI: Oh, yeah, absolutely. The reason why I wanted to, I want to probe this a little bit with you, is because it's 21st century, this is a distinctly different, let's put it, let's say, motivation, the spiritual religious motivation than a hundred years ago, right?

Because larger families were much more common a century and a half ago, for all sorts of reasons. A lot of them were economic, right? Like young children were, they would grow up to be workers, or infant mortality rates were higher. And now that's not the case. So let me ask you, I'm sure the one question that many listeners right now are screaming at the radio is how do these families make ends meet? How is it possible to adequately support having the greater number of children?

PAKALUK: Great question. Just I want to assure your listeners that we intentionally sought out women at all levels of the economic spectrum.

And so some women, they're not struggling financially to make ends meet, but many of them were. And so what did that look like? We heard all kinds of stories ranging from, we don't buy clothing firsthand. We only buy clothing secondhand. Obviously largely, these are families who they don't eat out, eat at home, they make their own meals, which substantially reduces your food costs.

Kids are doubled up in bedrooms. So these are not necessarily families committed to each kid is in their own bedroom. And when I say that, I really mean sometimes you could see 4 or 5 or 6 kids in one bedroom. One mom even said that she tries to separate her kids, but they keep gravitating back to sleeping in the same room together.

I guess I would say, ordinary stories of thriftiness. And I heard thriftiness across the board. I also heard, and I want to be clear, I also heard things that related to community support. Women who talked about being embedded in church communities where there were frequently acts of generosity, meals brought after babies are born, clothing shared, gear for children shared. One mom said, we got to a place where we really couldn't fit in our car anymore. I think this was Esther. She said, we didn't fit in the car anymore. And she said, I want your readers to know that life goes on when you don't fit in the minivan anymore.

CHAKRABARTI: Wow.

PAKALUK: And she said, you just don't go someplace altogether anymore.

But it was interesting to me, they didn't buy a bigger car, and they didn't buy a second car. They just adjusted their lifestyle. So in a nutshell, that is how, all kinds of adjustments, certainly, examples of generosity. And then I would say, an overall attitude of sort of thriftiness, and we'll say a willingness to diverge from cultural standards about what children need.

So, as for instance, I was just looking at data which showed that we spend so much more money per child on clothing than we did in 1950. A lot of the women talked about, you don't need the things people say that you need. And it's okay to diverge from the sort of cultural norm.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. But this, I want to underscore what you just said, because it's really important. For the same reasons that many women don't want to have any children, or a large number of children is the dearth of social supports, right? An economic support. And as you just said, perhaps for the women who choose to have more than average children, part of the reason why they are getting those roughly equivalent supports from their religious communities.

PAKALUK: Yes.

CHAKRABARTI: And it's not just bringing food after the baby's born. It's even like the social and spiritual support. It's the built in community, so that maybe babysitting is easier. It's like almost everything. And it's within the context of their churches, synagogues, temples, et cetera.

PAKALUK: Yes, that's right. And it's what that stuff means, right? As you point out, it's not just the meals. It's what the meals mean. It means that 40 families sign up to bring you a meal.

Maybe there's 40 people that you could call on if something doesn't work down the line.

CHAKRABARTI: But in your book, though, you seem to imply that the solution then, if we want to encourage a higher native birth rate, you don't seem to think that the solution then is for a secular society to mimic the supports that are happening in religious societies. Why?

PAKALUK: Yeah, I think in part it's because it's not obvious how we could do that. Yeah, I think in part, it's because it's not obvious how we could do that community anywhere to do these things. And I frequently say that people ought to do them, if you see somebody in a restaurant struggling with a baby, that's not well behaved, go over and say something nice. Anyway, those are obviously, there's a bunch of things we can do, but I think that the concern in general is that it's easier to have a family.

It's easier to have the family that you want to have. If you want to have a family within a tight knit community, within a community where there are those social supports all there. It's not that secular society shouldn't aim to reproduce. If possible, communities of solidarity and support, like 100% they should.

But what I do mean is that sort of I'm an economist. The sort of policy watch universe, that the impersonal way of trying to get more benefits to families through the tax code or through other types of subsidies has have been experimented with in Europe. It isn't working particularly well.

It doesn't seem to have the payoff we're looking for. And so I'm searching for other reasons. I'm searching for kind of a better way to understand why is it that when we say some of the women I interviewed, they moved into a church community where there was a ton of support and they said, Oh gosh, maybe it's possible to have a third.

I didn't even think I could ever do it, but I'm looking around and I'm saying, here I could do it. And that's a very clear sense that it's possible to move the needle, but it doesn't look like it's possible to move the needle through like large text and transfer schemes. And so I'm trying to highlight the power of these local and small close knit church communities, to do a thing that to my knowledge, no government has managed to do yet. And a lot of governments have tried.

CHAKRABARTI: But you're not implying, though, that spiritual fulfillment or meaning in having children, or even many children, is uniquely available through religion.

Are you?

PAKALUK: No, absolutely not. I think having children is a universal human experience and that the spiritual goods attached to children are universally accessible. I that's 1,000% true in my mind. But what we have to ask this question, as we look at the way in which people seem increasingly unable to transition to having the families that they want to have.

Ask the question, Why is that happening? And of course, I'm not here and maybe your next guest in your miniseries can do this. I'm not here to report to you findings from the group of people who haven't transitioned. What I've done is I've just gone out and asked this group of people that have managed to have the families they wanted to have. So what's going on? And if you come away with it, it's almost like an empirical finding. You come away and you say, okay look, I don't know if this will always hold everywhere, but it sure looks like there is something special going on in these religious communities.

Part III

CHAKRABARTI: Now, Professor Pakaluk, we put out this call last week in anticipation of talking to you today, and we did get some really interesting responses. So let's just listen to Ashley Horn. She's the mother of seven from Syracuse, Utah, and she tells us that having children is the single most meaningful experience of her life.

ASHLEY HORN: I have enjoyed every single stage of my children, from babies to teenagers. I have teenagers in my home now, and I might love that more than babies even, which has been a surprise to me. I just love watching them grow and develop spiritually. It's very meaningful to me. It feels like holy work to me.

CHAKRABARTI: Holy work. But Ashley also told us that holy work hasn't come without a cost.

HORN: I took a lot of time off work to raise my kids and I'm just now at 37 really investing in my career. I even paused in getting my bachelor's degree and just finished that this year actually. And I'm just starting a master's program now at 37.

And so it has been a sacrifice, and I would be lying if that had not created like a lot of stress and strain in my life. But overall, it has been so wonderful, and I would do it all over again.

CHAKRABARTI: That's On Point listener Ashley Horn in Syracuse, Utah. Professor Pakaluk, talk to me about how the women you listened to worked through the kinds of trade offs and stresses and strains that Ashley there described.

PAKALUK: Yeah, actually, just her, Ashley's testimony sounds very similar to a lot of the stories I heard where yeah, I would say a couple of things. One of the things that emerged, in many cases, was this sense of urgency. So I think that a lot of the women I talked to, not all of them, arrived at young adulthood already with a sense that they would like to prioritize family and transition to family early, earlier than normal.

And the reason I raised that is because the stresses that Ashley talked about are the kinds of things that many of the moms I interviewed talked about, involve going off of a kind of generally accepted timeline for things. So just to give words Danielle, one of the moms I talked to, she had been in medical school.

She met her husband in medical school, and then she finished her residency and then took time off. It was supposed to just be a maternity leave for a few months, to have her first child. And she said, it was the first time in my life that I came up for air. And she spent a lot of time talking about how kind of the fast train that most of us as women get on is it's a fast train.

And especially if we're confident people, and enjoying our work. And many people talked about enjoying their work tremendously. And then what happens is, you're on that training. You never get a chance to say, maybe I'd like to try out having my first kid. So you don't end up experiencing that first kid until you're much older.

And then it's tougher to build the family that you want to. Yes, maybe I've gotten off of what you asked, but I would say, in general, women talked about that trade off being difficult involving identity challenges, involving sacrifice. And kind of one woman said putting things on the back burner, but knowing they're not on the back burner forever, you're going to rotate them back to the front.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. It's interesting because in thinking about how, again, the women that you interviewed, even though they come from a diversity of backgrounds and educational professional experiences, that faith is the thing that binds them. It was fascinating to me though, that even in faith communities, there has been a declining birth rate.

Right. What? By 1980 the Catholic fertility rates were a quarter of a child, if I can put it bluntly. That's lower than Protestants.

PAKALUK:  That's right.

CHAKRABARTI: For Mormon families, for LDS families, even though they have a still slightly higher fertility rate than the national average.

So interesting that recently in Utah, yes. Fertility rates declined 40% between 2007 to 2014 alone. What do you make of that?

PAKALUK: Yeah, that's right. I think it shows that sort of the power of these trends. These trends are, I would use the language of economic. They relate to very fundamental questions of kind of what the value of things looks like to people, nobody's immune as a general group.

No one's immune from falling birth rates, and this is true. Globally, as well as inside of United States. Utah has this plummeting birth rate, but it's only because they started out higher. So they've experienced the most significant decline in the last 20 years. Yep. That's why it's really important to investigate what's going on and what kinds of things might provide an alternative.

An alternative set of values that could be helpful for some people. When I present the views of the women I studied on college campuses, a lot of young women I meet say, I've never heard that before. I've never met anybody who had that experience.

So I think that certainly, at least, speaks to the importance of getting another set of values out on the table.

CHAKRABARTI: I want to just pause for a moment and acknowledge that in the United States, we have a beautiful diversity of families, right?

PAKALUK: Yes.

CHAKRABARTI: And we've been focusing on biological children, but there are millions of people in this country who open their hearts and homes to love foster children, adopted children, grandparents who are parenting their grandchildren, partners of all stripes, not just men and women.

And so I wanted to point that out, because when we're talking about meaning, I think people, there's something to be said about the unique meaning garnered from being involved in a child's life in any way, whether or not they share your biological, your DNA.

PAKALUK: Yes, 100%.

And I'd like to say that although I wasn't, this study is small, it was that if you're going to spend this many hours with people, you can't interview thousands of people. So we really just looked for families that had their biological children.

However, so interestingly, we talked to many moms in this, even the small sample, who in addition to their children, had also fostered, opened their home to fostering, and in some cases adoption as well. And I certainly want to underscore the importance of that, that path to parenting.

CHAKRABARTI: Before we get to talking a little bit more about.

You offer some solutions towards the end of the book about the decline in fertility rate. Can we just take a second to learn a little bit more about you?

PAKALUK: Oh, I thought I had escaped.

CHAKRABARTI: (LAUGHS) Oh, no, not quite.

PAKALUK: Oh, that's so funny. Sure, of course. I I teach now at Catholic University.

And I say right in the first chapter that I could have fit my study sample. So I have 8 children. And I also helped my husband raise 6 children from his first marriage. He lost his first wife to breast cancer. And so children have been a big part of my life, obviously. And so I don't know what else I can tell you, except that, obviously, I share many of the sentiments of the women that I interviewed, but I want to stress that from a research perspective, the value here, and we've known this in sociology and qualitative work for a long time.

If you want to send somebody to interview a minority population, and this really is a minority population today, it's important to send somebody who isn't an outsider. Because people feel judged and criticized in a sense. So I teamed up with a colleague and a friend at Brigham Young University, Emily Reynolds who is a little bit older than I am and raised seven children, about a generation ahead of me. And so that provided two different faith perspectives in our interviews. I did about 80% of the interviews and she did 20. But we both brought that perspective into the homes of the women we interviewed. Look we are not here to judge you.

We just want to discuss with you, the kinds of motives that led here and all of the struggles and the sufferings and the difficulties. We want to hear it all. And it was a privilege to hear those stories.

CHAKRABARTI: Did you always know that you wanted to have many children?

PAKALUK: I probably did. I probably did. I know, I think it's always difficult to know what we always thought. And we, because I think, as we grow, we realize we change and we develop, but I came from a large family. I was the oldest of nine. And for me, and I won't generalize, for me, that was a wonderful experience. The times when my mom had another baby, of course, I was the oldest, they were all younger than I was, but the times when she brought a new one home, it was like Christmas. We just super loved it. We would spend months arguing about what the name was going to be, and especially as I got old enough to really develop a friendship, like a personal relationship with those little guys. when one little brother named Jack who lives in the Boston area.

My goodness, he and I were just like best friends. When I was already in middle school, early high school. And boy, like he really made my life colorful and alive. and as a young person already brought all this meaning. So I think I left young adulthood pretty convinced that if it was possible to have children, you never want to take that for granted, but if it was possible, I would like to have many children.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. Professor Pakaluk, we only have a couple of minutes left here and we're always looking for solutions on this show. But I wonder in the conclusion of your book, it seems that you put a recentering of religious life as the primary solution to the declining birth rate in the United States. Because, you say that nations that crowd out the sacred functions of the church will continue to reap a sterile harvest of disappointment.

You say religious freedom as a family policy would mean the government's taking a step back from providing human services directly, starting with education and asking churches to become stronger by doing more. Our religious institutions are too weak and they will remain weak, unable to inspire the heroic sacrifices we need so long as states and nations do their work.

Why look to religion as the primary solution for a declining birth rate, it's in our constitution. We are a secular nation.

PAKALUK: Right. Great question. First of all, I am speaking to you today from Poland. I'm here talking about birth rates in Poland, but I'm also here looking at, and I've had a chance to be taken around, to visit a lot of these sites of the scars of communism.

And so this is a big piece of the question. Is like, how do human beings function? Do we find purpose and meaning instead of mass society? Are we able to do that? Or do we always, in every age, need the small and the local and do we, in every age, need God? And the Polish people would have said we 100% do need God.

And that's the first point. The second point is, Aren't we a country based on a secular country? We are. We certainly are. And so I definitely don't mean that what we mean is for the government to get more religious. I don't mean that at all, but I do mean to reconsider the way that we organize, we'll say our public charity, right?

The way that we have tried to direct benefits to the most needy. And so what we do right now is we basically tag people. You have your one government identification number, and that's your access. It's how we decide how much taxes you owe. And that's how we decide what benefits you are owed by society.

And I'm asking the question of whether or not we are going to be able to incentivize the things that we'd like to incentivize in this kind of mass society way, or whether or not we will find it more easy, more effective to do. When it's personal and local, and that is really the tradition of the United States, right?

Because although we were, let me rephrase that, we were a secular country. Because we were a country of many diverse, pluralistic but strong religious communities, of all different faiths, all around the early colonies. So it wasn't a commitment to having no religion in our lives. It was a commitment to not having the government pick one, right?

CHAKRABARTI: But you say without a religious formation that fosters biblical values, which is not an acknowledgement of all religions, you say without that, low birth rate trends will not be reversed.

PAKALUK: This is my prediction. So it looks like at the moment, we don't see it empirically.

We don't see flourishing of above replacement birth rates in places that are absent some kind of connection to the biblical traditions. This is my judgment as a scientist, like looking at these trends around the world. And if I discover a spot where I say, oh, look at that, there's flourishing in the absence of these biblical values.

That would be interesting, but so far, I don't see it. I will keep looking. I'll keep looking.