Hannah's Children Quotes

“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.”
― Catherine Pakaluk, Hannah's Children: The Women Quietly Defying the Birth Dearth

“Only the full experience of [natality] can bestow upon human affairs faith and hope, those two essential characteristics of human existence,” wrote Hannah Arendt in 1958. “It is this faith in and hope for the world that found perhaps its most glorious and most succinct expression in the few words with which the Gospels announced their ‘glad tidings’: ‘A child has been born unto us.’”11”
― Catherine Pakaluk, Hannah's Children: The Women Quietly Defying the Birth Dearth

“Women make choices about having children based on “costs and benefits”—but not in the way we usually understand that phrase, which is the cash money we give up or get. Rather, women compare the subjective personal value of having another child with the subjective personal value of what they will miss out on if they have one. Both sides of the scale include gains and losses. The choice to have a child is a value determination about the relative size of those gains and losses. The values will not usually be quantifiable for an individual woman or comparable across women—even if a common estimation of things may arise out of our social nature.”
― Catherine Pakaluk, Hannah's Children: The Women Quietly Defying the Birth Dearth

“The women in our study gave witness to another sort of reply to the crisis of the West. Not a plan, or a policy, but a message—the salvation of the world is in the birth of a child.”
― Catherine Pakaluk, Hannah's Children: The Women Quietly Defying the Birth Dearth

“I think that bringing children into the world is like bringing holiness into the world. Like every soul has a mission that can only be fulfilled by that individual and we don’t know what that individual’s mission is and even what our own mission is. We’re all figuring it out as we go. And I think, yes, it is something that I do for God in a sense of the work component.”
― Catherine Pakaluk, Hannah's Children: The Women Quietly Defying the Birth Dearth

“Most basically, the women in my sample went on to have more children because the value of doing so exceeded the value of not doing so. They ranked the next child more highly than the other things they could do with their time and resources. They embraced a scale of values in which something of tremendous worth was attached to having a child; that something was the kind of thing typically reckoned worth dying for: love for a beloved, love of God, love of eternal life, and the pursuit of happiness. No wonder, then, that women reported their losses as the dying of other goods that were truly good. The American women quietly defying the birth dearth had incentives big enough to die for.”
― Catherine Pakaluk, Hannah's Children: The Women Quietly Defying the Birth Dearth

“There are truths that cannot be captured by statistics, no matter how fancy. And these truths are still the purview of social science, whether or not a century of quantification has worked to push them away.”
― Catherine Pakaluk, Hannah's Children: The Women Quietly Defying the Birth Dearth

“Women’s time is the biggest input into childbearing; if that input has become more expensive in terms of opportunity costs, only those with an extraordinarily high demand for children will still have children—whether they go to medical school or not. No social welfare policy in the world is (or could be) generous enough to change that calculus. What you need is the conviction, captured in Steph’s considered answer to the rude lady at Goofy’s Kitchen: “Because this is where the joy in life comes from.”
― Catherine Pakaluk, Hannah's Children: The Women Quietly Defying the Birth Dearth

“Make it easier for churches and religious communities to run schools, succor families, and aid the needs of human life. Religion is the best family policy.”
― Catherine Pakaluk, Hannah's Children: The Women Quietly Defying the Birth Dearth