Economist, mother of eight has a countercultural message amid declining American birth rates

An American economist with a large family argues that, despite the declining birthrate, the decision to have kids is an individual choice in which the government should play no part.

Catherine Ruth Pakaluk, an economist at the Catholic University of America, has eight children of her own, which prompted her to look at why just 5% of American women opt to have five or more children amid a historic “birth dearth” as she calls it in her book, “Hannah’s Children,” titled after the Biblical character Hannah. As part of her research, Pakaluk interviewed 55 women with college degrees and five or more children in ten different American regions, asking them about themselves, their children, their careers and why they chose to have a larger than average family in a country with a declining birth rate. 

Pakaluk, who doesn’t consider herself a natalist, has opinions about childbearing that run contrary to many conservative and pronatalist views. She doesn’t, for example, support subsidies, child tax credits or any governmental policy that encourages childbearing for women, she told Fox News Digital.

Instead, Pakaluk believes women ultimately won’t be swayed to have children because of financial incentives and argues that the decision by Americans not to have kids has more to do with American culture rather than the economy. Notably, Pakaluk’s subjects were primarily religious, consisting of Catholics, Evangelicals, Mormons and Jews.

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But, the women she spoke with also said their decision to have children was a deliberate choice, where they prioritized their kids around work rather than waiting to have kids until their career was established. 

“My subjects described their choice to have many children as a deliberate rejection of an autonomous, customized, self-regarding lifestyle in favor of a way of life intentionally limited by the demands of motherhood,” she writes.

The “Birth Dearth” 

The replacement level is accepted as 2.1 children per woman, where if it is any higher, the population grows and if it is any lower, the population shrinks. Currently, the United States’ total fertility rate is at about 1.6. But, Pakaluk said there is no part of the world or the globe that isn’t touched by the phenomenon of countries beginning to have too few children to replace their own populations.

“The native populations of countries all around the globe are beginning, just in the last few years, to shrink,” she said. “The global population itself will shrink before too long,” impacting national identity, economic growth and familial community.

The term “Birth Dearth” was originally coined by Ben Wattenberg for his book by the same name in response to the 1968 book “The Population Bomb,” which sparked worldwide fears of overpopulation. Pakaluk remains firm in her belief that the “Birth Dearth” has occurred for economic reasons, but isn’t fixed with economic solutions. Instead, she believes the solution is cultural. 

Pakaluk with her kids (Catherine Pakulak)

“If people have family goals for themselves and they also have career goals, it’s going to work out best if they can pursue careers in avenues, industries, professions where there’s a lot of flexibility,” Pakaluk said.

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“For people who really wanted family, it was helpful to know early on that they wanted family, and then they pursued family as a priority and then set career milestones around their kids,” she added. 

It’s fine for people to not want children, Palakuk said, but for those who do, they often miss the ideal time to build a family under the impression that they have more time than they do. 

“College, medical school, law school, and the like don’t require lower fertility, they just eat up childbearing years. If you get married early enough, and have kids right away, you can still have an average-sized family—a big family even,” Pakaluk writes. “But the biological deck is stacked against you, and the opportunity costs mount as the years of schooling go by.”

“Women can’t be bought”

Because Pakulak believes the solution to the “Birth Dearth” is cultural, she doesn’t think subsidies address the issue for a multitude of reasons. 

“I step back from this policy conversation and I sort of think, are we in this place where we really think women can be sort of bought?” she asked. “Having a kid isn’t like joining a gym, that’s like a lifetime commitment. Hopefully, we believe that people make that decision for really deep and important reasons that become, for them, compelling enough to overcome the fears [of having kids].”

Beautiful pregnant woman holds hands on her belly. Happy mother waiting for baby birth. Pregnancy, maternity, preparation and expectation concept. (iStock)

Pakaluk considered countries like South Korea and Australia, which have used subsidies to encourage people to have children, but didn’t work. She hypothesizes that people are afraid that having kids will affect their lives in ways that are just too big to be offset by a bonus payment.

“They don’t work, I think, because they’re not big enough to be a counterbalance against what holds people back,” she told Fox News Digital. “I think what holds people back from having children is very large concerns about whether having a child will change their lifestyle in really important and painful ways,” whether it’s their job, lifestyle or location. 

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Additionally, programs like Social Security operate under the assumption that people will have kids, but face insolvency if they don’t, she said. Pakaluk points to industrialization as a major reason behind the decline in the necessity of children. 

“These are social programs that rely on, essentially, transfers from today’s workers to retired workers,” she said. “They built into the assumption that people would keep having kids and there would be a moderate level of population growth and what we’ve seen is that’s not true.”

Countercultural Conservative

Pakaluk repeatedly reaffirmed her belief that the decision to have kids should be left up to individual families and that the government should avoid policies that pressure women into having kids. She admits some of her ideas about how the declining birth rate should be handled might conflict with liberal progressives, as well as pronatalist conservatives.

“If being politically conservative today means that you are behind big state programs to incentivize childbearing, then I’m kind of not a good conservative,” she said. “I’m conservative in the sense that I definitely believe in traditional values, and I believe that family matters a lot to society, believe marriage matters a lot to society and I think that we have to examine whether our retreat from marriage and children has made us better or worse, because I think it’s a choice we made.”

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“However, I’m departing from this, I would say, current conservative craze, which says if we just spend more money on families and marriage, we could make it happen,” she added. “In that sense, I am very convicted that the story of the Birth Dearth and also the retreat from marriage is one that’s only fixable through cultural changes.” 

Pakaluk remains firm in her belief that pronatal initiatives to try to raise the birthrate haven’t worked. She also encouraged caution in the case of government overreach. 

“I don’t think that the state should be targeting birth rates,” she said. “I think the state should be promoting an economic and political climate in which families flourish and can flourish.”

“If we grant that the government has the right to target higher birth rates, I don’t see how we don’t also then admit that government has the right to target lower birth rates if it sees fit,” she added.

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