Briefly Reviewed: April 2026

Hannah’s Children: The Women Quietly Defying the Birth Dearth

By Catherine Ruth Pakaluk

Publisher: Regnery Gateway

Pages: 384

Price: $35

Review Author: Elizabeth Hanink

These days you can’t pick up a newspaper without seeing reports about the birth dearth. Even China, long known for a brutal one-child stricture, wants women to have more babies. Op-ed pieces abound on what might work to induce women to have more children. But there is a tension for young women that can’t be overlooked — namely, if you have several children, you will not have the same career track as those with one or none. Nor will your family enjoy the material comforts that two salaries might provide. There will be less time and money for things like “self-care,” “date night,” or lavish vacations.

But there are some women for whom personal development doesn’t matter so much. Catherine Ruth Pakaluk and her fellow researchers are interested in women who choose to have larger-than-average families. Their study, from which Pakaluk’s book Hannah’s Children derives, focused on women with five or more children, some with as many as 15, found across a spectrum of affluence, education, and religion. What Pakaluk and company discovered is interesting. Despite the cultural pressure to limit family size — and it remains real — these women choose to carry and rear however many children God sends them. They do not seem especially worried about student loans, housing costs, or the many other expenses that plague young families.

It isn’t that these women don’t experience doubt or fatigue. When they don’t feel ready for another child, they avoid pregnancy until they perceive the time is right. Their children are, in most every case, the intentional result of soul searching, as several women believe God will let them know when the time for a child has come. Like the biblical Hannah, they act on faith. They trust that God has a larger purpose for their lives. These women don’t necessarily eschew jobs or careers; it’s just that these considerations are not determinative. The author is herself the mother of a large family and, along with several subjects in the study, an active professional. A good many of the women speak of youthful dreams they had to defer or abandon. Take Eileen, a mother of six. “I think, ultimately, you become more yourself the more you grow in virtue,” she says. “We become who we’re supposed to be by giving ourselves away. I think that ultimately is what I would rest on — a confidence that you gain in that.”

Not every subject in the study grew to adulthood knowing that a large family was what she or her husband wanted. As one mother says, “We wrongly came to believe that smaller family sizes are a positive good: for responsible parenting, a productive economy, and a more fulfilled adulthood.” But at some point, the family recognized the profound role they have been granted and decided that no other role would be as important. None. None of these parents had children to find fulfillment, yet fulfillment came anyway. Husbands are important in the decision. All these women are married, and raising children is a joint effort, even if accomplished in different ways.

Pakaluk is an economist, and she deftly provides a wealth of economic information that brings the reader up to date on population issues, debunks myths about overpopulation, and catalogues the various childbearing incentives offered worldwide. She notes the costs of additional children in lost income, satisfaction, and status. She writes, “Having a child doesn’t cost only so many diapers and so much baby food…. It costs the gap between what a mom will earn working part-time and what she might have earned with uninterrupted work and an advanced degree. It costs the missing reputation from not being ‘seen as valuable’…. And it costs the missed enjoyment of personal professional interests. As the average family size dives, another child also costs the social alienation of defying the norm.”

Pakaluk explores how society loses when too few children are born. The introduction of widespread contraception has had repercussions far beyond the bedroom. Many government programs, including Social Security and Medicare, are predicated on younger generations of workers supporting retired old folks. The fewer young workers there are, however, the more modest benefits must be. Production outside the home, compulsory schooling, and New Deal-style programs achieve some goals but diminish the economic value of large families. This information, though important, is not what commends this book. It is the graceful mingling of data with the personal stories of its subjects that makes Hannah’s Children so engaging. Pakaluk’s interjections of her own thoughts as a mother and scholar lend an easy air of informality.

The book does contain a few weaknesses. The identity of each subject is disguised, but while a desire for privacy is understandable, anonymity diminishes personal stories by raising questions about whether certain particulars have been lost. Pakaluk relies on direct quotes from each interviewee, especially when writing about the spiritual and emotional aspects of having so many children. But not all the women are articulate, and Pakaluk’s paraphrasing is sometimes distracting. All the women are either Christian or Jewish, and the book would have benefited from having agnostics and Muslims in the mix.

What does this piece of research reveal other than some people like having more children and are willing to bear the cost? First, it reveals that government incentives, such as large subsidies and tax credits, even expanded maternity leave and other parental-leave policies, won’t work. Indeed, the real resources to have another child cannot come from the government. Such “reasons of the heart” cannot be parceled out. The choice has to come from deep within and be wanted for its own sake and counted as worth the costs, which are personal and subjective.

Second, it reveals that “people will lay down their comforts, dreams, and selves for God, not for subsidies. If the state can’t save the American family, it can give religion a freer rein to try. Religion is the cardinal family policy.” Here Pakaluk makes her most important analysis. To reverse the decline in birthrates, we must have freedom of religion, not just freedom of worship. We need, in her words, an emancipation of religious institutions to collaborate with parents in the work of education so that more than seven percent of American children can attend religious schools. It is also important to strengthen, not weaken, religious institutions, so that their members, not the state, provide needed human services. The corporal and spiritual works of mercy are serious imperatives, and we need the Church’s strength to practice them.

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