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

by Catherine Pakaluk

So if those are not the answers, what is the answer? It’s hard to say. I suppose it boils down to some sort of 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 I am capable of doing.