Can We Have More Children Please?

Dr Martin looks at the birth dearth, discussing a recent book, Hannah’s Children, by Catherine Ruth Pakaluk, mother of eight and stepmother of six.

From Crisis

By Regis Martin, STD

A nation unwilling to augment its own population with generous allotments of children will not survive. Nor does it deserve to.

Now that our long national nightmare is over and the fury and fear about the end of democracy and the rise of fascism with its apparatus of terror and internment camps are finally behind us, might it be possible to start thinking about children again? I mean, now that it’s safe to have babies, why don’t we just go ahead and unleash the power of young women, and the men whom they marry, to say yes to life?  

I mean, do we want to have a future or not? Because if we do, then we’re going to have to fill it with something. Why not children? Who else is going to show up? More than half the country having refused to vote for the Kamala Harris version, what other alternative have we got besides life? Why not celebrate Morning in America by putting an end to the birth dearth?  

Besides, a nation unwilling to augment its own population with generous allotments of children will not survive. Nor does it deserve to. Our greatest resource is life, which does not come from couples unwilling to step out of their comfort zones in order to risk welcoming them into their homes. The “cat ladies” across the land are not going to seed another generation for us. Nor are the men who date them. On a cost-effective calculus, neither are likely to view children as an asset much less as a blessing.   

Meanwhile, we are facing the most dramatic drop in the birth rate in decades. We are simply not replacing ourselves as a species. Will universal infertility be the future we never expected, even as ever-increasing numbers of contraceptive couples, for whom abortion is always the default position when the damn thing fails to function, hurl us in that direction? In my own lifetime, for example, there has been a shocking 60 percent decline, a datum dismayingly evident in neighborhoods once teeming with kids but now sadly vacant. Where have all the children gone?

Elsewhere, too, the statistics appear to be as bleak as any dystopian novel. In Japan, for instance, we are told that the numbers of those dying are twice the number of those being born. Something is surely wrong when more diapers are being sold for incontinent adults than for healthy infants. Will universal infertility be the future we never expected? 

What to do about it?

In a wonderful new book, which just came out this year, there may be an answer to that question. It is called Hannah’s Children, written by a very bright and venturesome woman named Catherine Ruth Pakaluk who, when she’s not teaching in the Busch School of Business at Catholic University, is raising what appears to be a regular platoon of youngsters. In the book, she recounts the stories of dozens of college-educated women like herself, all scattered about the place, who, despite the usual indices of life in a contraceptive culture, are nevertheless having quite large families. And, by all accounts, feeling entirely at peace about it all. 

In telling their stories, Professor Pakaluk cannot help but tell her own, which, like so many others in the book, seems to be rooted in what she calls, 

some deeply held thing, possibly from childhood—a platinum conviction—that the capacity to conceive children, to receive them into my arms, to take them home, to dwell with them in love, to sacrifice for them as they grow, and to delight in them as the Lord delights in us, that that thing, call it motherhood, call it childbearing, that that thing is the most worthwhile thing in the world—the most perfect thing that I am capable of doing.

Isn’t that a stunning statement? And, she goes on to add, 

If these notions seem biblical, it’s because they are. The women defying the birth dearth had a reason to have children big enough to give up their lives more than once or twice, and that reason came from a deep trust in God, or love for their spouses, or love for their children—often all three. 

How beautifully expressive that is of the heart and soul of a mother, of one whose whole life becomes a continuing consecration to the child God has allowed her to have. “At the very moment of the child’s birth,” writes Gertrud von le Fort in her profound meditation The Eternal Woman, “the mother stakes her life without reserve for the child, so after its birth her life no longer belongs to herself, but to the child.” Thus, in giving life to that child, in her constant love and acceptance of that unique and unrepeatable gift, “the mother carries life on into endlessness, so that in her capacity of nurturing and sheltering life she injects into time an element of eternity.”

Once again, it calls vividly to mind the sheer mystery of motherhood, of one who, in first looking upon the face of her child, awakens the child to the realization that he or she is infinitely precious. It is as if God Himself were bestowing His own smile upon the child, affirming through a mother’s love the ineffaceable goodness of the child’s being. “The birth of a child,” writes Carl Sandburg, “is nothing less than God’s opinion that life should go on.” 

And it really is the only link we have in a chain of life that stretches far back into the ancestral past, even as it stretches far into the future. “Children are the key to infinity,” as one mother would discover in her willingness to give God permission to give her more.

What other experience is there to equal the joy of bringing life into the world, of nurturing that life, of locating the very seat of one’s own identity in becoming a parent? It is such a paradox, too, that it should all depend on an openness whose outcome we cannot control, a submission, finally, to a God whose will we cannot always divine. “Surrender to God,” says von le Fort, “is the only absolute power that the creature possesses.” It is the power of Eros, of the Life Force itself, which stands athwart death, giving us the clearest evidence we have that there is a future and that it is full of hope. 

It should surprise no one that the God in whom we believe, and on whom we stake everything, is on the side of life. He is no abstract or impersonal idea, however all-comprehending the concept we assign to the word. He is, instead, the very origin and ground of all that is. And each time two people surrender themselves wholly to one another in love, they are yielding up their bodies to a God whose very name means life. Why else do we have such highpoints of Holy Scripture as the passage in Exodus telling us I AM WHO AM is the God who simply is, or the passage in the Letter of John telling us God is love, if not to assure us that God remains unmistakably on the side of life?  

Not only is there no future in saying no to life, there is not much fun in saying it, either.