Latest / The Lila Rose Show / E166: The Truth About Babies, Big Families, And Happiness w/Catherine Pakaluk

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E166: The Truth About Babies, Big Families, And Happiness w/Catherine Pakaluk · The Lila Rose Show

• 0:00
  I think this is one of the hardest topics I've ever tried
• 0:02
  to think hard about. Making me cry, Catherine, it's
• 0:05
  like so sad. This is a pretty awkward
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  question to ask. Is there such a thing as
• 0:10
  overpopulation? Do people know that babies have
• 0:13
  the capacity to bring healing to anxious, troubled teenagers or
• 0:17
  grieving adult men? Catherine Piccolo, welcome to
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  the podcast. Thank you.
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  I'm an admirer of yours. So thanks for making it out
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  here. Absolutely.
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  And Congrats on your new book. You've got it here in studio
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  hands, children, the women quietly defying the birth
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  dearth. That's right.
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  And you are single handedly in part doing that.
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  First, for folks who don't know, we'll get into your your
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  personal story here in a moment, but tell me a little bit about
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  your background. Yeah, so I teach at Catholic
• 0:46
  University, the Catholic University of America, which is
• 0:49
  in Washington, DC and I was trained as an economist.
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  So my formal trainings in economics before that, I worked
• 0:55
  a little bit in public health. And let's see, I've been
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  teaching at Catholic University for 10 years.
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  And then I'm a wife and a mom, and that's a big part of my
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  life. So trying to combine those
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  things together. And I've I've worked a lot more
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  and taught a lot more as my children have gotten older.
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  And then share a little bit you have how many kids?
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  So I have my husband and I together have eight children and
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  they range from 24 down to 8 years old and we also raised six
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  children from his first marriage.
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  He lost his first wife to breast cancer in 1998 and we got
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  married a year later and we raised those six children.
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  Amazing, amazing. Beautiful family I I'm actually
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  familiar with your husband's late wife's story because she
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  has there's an incredible book about her life, the appalling
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  mercy of the strength of of, of God is that the.
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  Title The appalling strange is the mercy of God.
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  I believe it's AI believe it's a line from a Graham Greene novel.
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  So I I don't think I can tell you which one, but maybe
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  Brighton Rock. But that's where that mouthful
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  of a title. And so your first year, your
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  stepchildren, those six children are from Ruth's or Ruth's
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  children who passed away due to cancer.
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  And you, you actually dedicated Hannah's children to Ruth's.
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  Children yes, exactly. And there's a bit of a story in
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  that, you know, I well, that's the first book I've written in
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  this in this way. So, you know, I thought, well,
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  but my middle name from birth was Ruth.
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  So a lot of people ask, well, you know, you use this middle
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  name Ruth. Did you take that name because,
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  you know, and I thought, no, that'd be a little bit strange.
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  No, no, this is but I always loved my middle name.
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  I have my first name is a Christian name.
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  My, my, my second name is a is a Jewish name.
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  So I just loved it. And so there was something
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  unusual about it. So when we got married that that
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  her name was in my name. And as an adoptive mom, you
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  know, it's kind of a mystery that you share your maternity
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  with the birth mother of your children.
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  And of course, she's more than, you know, a mere birth mother.
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  She raised them until she passed.
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  How old were they when she passed and you became the
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  adoptive mom? So they ranged from, you know,
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  about 5 or 6 up until up to 17. So as young as 5.
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  Yeah. So I'll try not to be too
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  emotional, but when you share maternity with somebody, it's
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  really kind of a mystery. I think there's a lot of there's
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  a lot of gift and blessing in that, right?
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  That the gift of those children, Ruth's children to me, right,
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  That you're going to cry. Your children are more of a
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  blessing to you than you are to them, right?
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  And that's a mystery we learn as we grow into our motherhood.
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  And so you recognize that you're so grateful, sublimely grateful
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  for someone else's passing their children to you in a sense,
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  right? Kind of willingly.
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  And but then that somebody, but then there's there's this
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  tragedy in it, right? And so it's this kind of mystery
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  of, of death and, and joy. And I don't know how else to put
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  it right that. But I think in every adoption,
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  there's, there's a, there's a tragedy and then there's this
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  huge blessing and this huge gift.
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  And it's, it's, I think it's hard to talk about.
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  So when I dedicated the book to Ruth's children, I did so
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  because those children, Ruth's children have been such a
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  blessing to me. And they mean so much in my
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  life. But I also meant to include, you
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  know, the, the shared maternity that we have because they're,
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  they're also my children, but they're also her children.
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  So that is why the book is dedicated to Ruth's children.
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  You're such a wonderful role model, Catherine, because you're
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  highly educated, very accomplished, successful and
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  doing this great work, you know, leading a department at the
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  University of the Catholic University of America.
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  So this is a lot of accomplishments.
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  You're an economist, you're PhD, you have this book.
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  You have also 14 children under your care.
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  So there's a lot of questions I have for you.
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  So thanks for sitting down. I want to talk about your book.
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  I also am very curious about your personal approach to work
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  and motherhood and adoptive motherhood too.
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  Can I ask you, what was it like when you were starting your
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  marriage already with six children, one as young as 5, who
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  loved their mother, who had passed from cancer, and then the
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  the wounds and traumas that can come with that, and then you go
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  on to have your own eight children.
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  What was that like starting out? Yeah, well, I would be
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  sanitizing it if I said it was just sort of like it all worked
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  out easily and it was easy it it all worked out, but it took a
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  long time. What was it like?
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  It was really hard. It was really, really hard.
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  I definitely didn't know what it meant to adopt children who
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  were. Yeah, I didn't know what it
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  meant at all. I mean, I felt deeply called to
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  that marriage. I felt that God had I put my
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  husband in my in my life and that I had an opportunity to say
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  yes. I wasn't.
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  I don't know what kind of certainty we can have in life,
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  right? But I thought it was as clear as
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  anything could be that this was a good decision.
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  I trusted that God would provide, but humanly speaking, I
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  had no idea. So no, I didn't have any idea.
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  So we got married and you know, I came back, I like to say I
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  came back from my Heidi Moon and was like, who are all these
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  people? So I didn't, I didn't know them
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  very well. And, and so it was, it was a
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  lot. It was a lot to learn.
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  And I would say, well, and I like to say how long it took
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  because I know many people, but people who hear about us
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  sometimes reach out. Well, you know, I married a
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  widower or I married a widow. It doesn't feel right yet.
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  It doesn't feel normal. But it took us a long time.
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  And I like to say it was a, it was probably, it was probably
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  five years until I thought like I could sort of relax.
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  Like I think it's going to be OK.
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  Like, these are my kids too, and I'm able to really love them
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  and. And I would say like the ups and
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  downs of sort of feeling like you've made a home together,
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  right? So people use this language of
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  blended family. And most of the time we we hear
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  that language in relation to divorced and remarried
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  households. But I think families who who
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  suffer the loss of a parent and have to blend or adopted homes,
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  adoptive homes from different households, my, you know,
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  dearest friend has adopted from foster care.
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  All of these are ways that we try to build a domestic
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  community together, right? And as a family.
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  And so we're here, we are asserting the mystery and the
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  truth about the institution of the family and how and how
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  healing it is and how it it works and it works outside of
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  the merits of our ability. And that was a lesson that I
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  would not have learned if I hadn't been put in a situation
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  where I didn't have the ability to do this.
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  I really didn't. Now I kind of thought that it I
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  well, I don't know what I thought.
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  I kind of thought I could just put a lot of effort into it and
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  it would work out. And I did put a lot of effort
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  in. But you know, only later you
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  realize that the things that worked worked outside of your
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  ability and they work because the because the married, the
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  married family tapped into grace is is a thing that's very
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  powerful and it heals and it it transforms and it it shelters
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  and allows life to kind of grow up underneath it.
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  It's it's bows, right, But I didn't know all that.
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  And so, you know, you think, OK, I have to do that.
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  I have to, you know, under read stories.
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  I'm going to figure out what they like.
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  Like all those things that you think you're and I think you do
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  those things. And that was overwhelming.
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  And it took, took a long time. So it took, I would say for me,
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  five years till we would sit down at the table for dinner and
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  I would think like, we're kind of a family.
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  And you had your own? Yeah, you were.
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  You had additional children by that.
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  Point by that point we had a couple and actually I'm glad you
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  reminded me to mention that because that's something I talk
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  about at the end of the book, which is probably the most
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  moving thing when one of the most moving things I heard in
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  the research for this book. I just mentioned how difficult
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  it was to feel one, to feel like a family when we got married.
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  A lot of people said you should try not to have children at all
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  at all, or at least for a while, you know, that it would be too
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  much or too traumatic that, you know, here we had all these
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  children who are grieving and would be too complicated for
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  there to be, you know, you've got these children and then
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  you're going to be complicated. And we we thought that was a
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  really sort of a depressing idea.
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  And on the other hand, you think like I was young and I thought,
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  well, maybe, yeah, maybe they're right.
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  You know, these children are grieving.
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  I don't really know. We got married and we thought,
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  well, we'll just see what happens.
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  We'll see what happens for a little while.
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  And then we'll sort of take stock and see how everybody's
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  doing. And if, if no baby has come, you
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  know, we'll kind of take that as a sign we should maybe, you
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  know, maybe wait or something. But God bless us with a baby
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  probably on our on our wedding day.
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  So, you know, so much so that, you know, it was like, oh,
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  that's a little bit shocking. But the reason I say it is
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  because he was born, you know, nine months after we got married
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  almost exactly. And if I, if I knew in advance
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  how much that child would serve to help draw us together, I
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  would have like gone out to try to do that earlier.
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  You know, I like would have figured it out.
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  So actually having welcoming new life into our kind of grieving,
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  blended, awkward family, it turned out to be the best thing
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  we could have done. And of course, that was another
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  lesson about God's Providence that, you know, kind of babies
• 10:24
  aren't ever going to be the problem.
• 10:26
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  So I think that's a driving thesis of this book.
• 11:16
  Babies aren't ever going to be the problem, including from the
• 11:20
  economic, you know, societal approach of what's best for a, a
• 11:25
  civilization. And there's so much in here.
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  I mean, clearly this was written by a PhD in economics because
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  there's all the, you know, you trace the history of thought on
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  population decline and growth. And you know, you talk about
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  Malthus, you talk about these different theories about what
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  population means. And then of course, you you also
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  interview. How many women did you
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  interview? Who?
• 11:46
  Were 55. 55 women and how many children did these women have?
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  They had at least five. We were after people doing
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  something definitely different. So yeah, five children.
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  And what was the genesis for you?
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  What originated for you this book?
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  Was it you mean you already are having your own kids?
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  But and then I know you care about the economic impacts of
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  population decline, but what was the the approach you took of
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  interviewing this set of 40 plus women who have this certain
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  number of children? What?
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  Why that approach? Yeah, Well, it seemed to me, and
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  I would just attribute it to a grace or kind of an insight, it
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  would say sort of hit me one day.
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  Everybody studying birth rate decline is just studying birth
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  rate decline. So is it the case that there's
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  no examples of exceptions to that?
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  Are there places where people are not suffering birth rate
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  decline? And so and so I thought, well,
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  of course there are, you know, I know places.
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  I mean, of course we've had a lot of kids.
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  And I thought, well, like, are we just like nobody could learn
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  anything from that? And I thought, well, you know,
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  you don't want to generalize from your own case.
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  So you think, well, what could we learn by looking around and
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  trying to discover? Are there common factors to
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  people who are a sort of immune from this declining birth rate?
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  So it's a little bit more interesting than it first
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  sounds, right? When you first think about it,
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  you go, well, well, actually this is a principle.
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  We do this all the time, right? So if you say, well, suppose you
• 13:07
  had a country where people were generally very unhealthy.
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  Suppose you only studied lack of health, right?
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  Would you ever learn the kinds of things that help people
• 13:17
  become fit and healthy? In other words, healthfulness is
• 13:22
  not merely not being unhealthy, right?
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  Like you have to think what, what drives people to get off
• 13:26
  the couch and become fit and active?
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  Well, there's a whole bunch of steps and there's things that
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  can drive them and motivate them.
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  And then there's real habits, things you have to know and
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  things that you can do. So I thought, well, actually,
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  this is a principle. It's true in public health as
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  well. You kind of go where are people
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  healthy who, who's not getting sick with this disease.
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  So I realized that actually, if you think about it as where
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  people are having children, that's kind of a clue.
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  It may be a clue, might provide clues to what we need to, to do,
• 13:56
  right. And so if you went around and
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  you talked all these people with five or more children and we can
• 14:01
  talk about why 5, It's not really not really a meaningful
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  number. It was just for the purposes of
• 14:05
  the research. But if you went around and
• 14:07
  talked to a bunch of people who were not experiencing population
• 14:10
  collapse, would you find out that they were, let's say, you
• 14:15
  know, people with all a weird birthmark or something.
• 14:17
  So if you did, you said that, well, you know, you have to have
• 14:19
  a purple birthmark to avoid population collapse.
• 14:22
  Well, you'd go talk to Washington, DC and you'd say
• 14:24
  there's nothing you can do about it, right?
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  The only people who are going to be immune to this have these
• 14:29
  special birthmarks. If, on the other hand, you find
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  out there's things you can believe, there's things you can
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  do, there's habits of, of life, those are things that you can
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  cultivate. If you cultivate those things,
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  they'll be more babies. And so of course, I had a hunch
• 14:43
  it wasn't the birthmark, you know?
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  But, you know, nobody had done this.
• 14:47
  Nobody had said, let's go find out what do people think?
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  What do they believe and what are they doing?
• 14:52
  All right, so before we dive into all of that, there's so
• 14:55
  much there. Give us the statistics on what
• 14:59
  population really looks like in the West and globally and why
• 15:04
  it's a concern. Yeah.
• 15:07
  So the the simple way to think about it is that about each
• 15:11
  woman has to have about two children in her lifetime for a
• 15:15
  population at large. So she replaces herself and her
• 15:18
  partner and that creates a stable non growing non drinking
• 15:23
  population. And any, anything less than two
• 15:27
  children is a over another couple generations will lead to
• 15:31
  shrinking population. And so the statistics around in
• 15:35
  the United States and around the globe, we in the United States
• 15:38
  have about 1.6 children per woman.
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  So that's pretty significantly below that kind of magic number
• 15:44
  of two. And around the world, that is
• 15:47
  the general trend. In fact, we've been a little
• 15:49
  late to that party. So we were a little bit after
• 15:51
  some other countries, notably most of Europe, especially
• 15:55
  Western Europe, now Eastern Europe too.
• 15:58
  And, and you know, Japan, we know Japan started its
• 16:01
  population shrinking already in 2008.
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  I think China started shrinking last year.
• 16:07
  South Korea has .7 children expected per woman.
• 16:11
  So, so very, very low birth rates and around the world and
• 16:16
  it's really there's no continent that isn't that isn't touched by
• 16:19
  this. So, so that means that within
• 16:21
  another couple of generations we'll begin to see peak
• 16:24
  population in the whole world and population decline.
• 16:27
  What are the consequences of population decline I.
• 16:29
  Was going to just say that we it's not necessarily good.
• 16:32
  So we've heard so much about overpopulation that it, I think
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  probably most people think like, oh Phew, we dodged a bullet like
• 16:39
  that isn't that good? Like it's good.
• 16:40
  Will it be declining? And, and it's probably better to
• 16:43
  step back from the world for a minute, just think about a
• 16:45
  particular country. But when you think about like
• 16:47
  the cities that have experienced sort of, you know, real
• 16:50
  population decline, what we're thinking about is those cities
• 16:52
  and towns and many parts of rural America where people have
• 16:55
  just moved away. When people move away and you
• 16:58
  think, what does that look like? Nobody's staffing the the the
• 17:01
  stores you can't sit at. There's no diners anymore.
• 17:04
  It's kind of like ghost town looking the way to call that is
• 17:08
  economic contraction. So kind of you can't have
• 17:12
  growth. A bust, not a boom.
• 17:14
  A bust, not a boom. The second thing really simply
• 17:17
  is that it will definitely lead to more political instability.
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  Why? Why does Why does?
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  Because people. Are the ultimate resource
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  because people want to be able to grow.
• 17:29
  They want prosperity. Great.
• 17:30
  Everybody does. That's why people come here.
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  That is the that is the the golden fleece in a sense.
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  And so when there are when there is an increasing shortage of
• 17:40
  people, there will be political instability.
• 17:42
  I mean, look at our Times Now just debates about immigration,
• 17:47
  but that will be, there will be instability because people will
• 17:49
  be trying to figure out how to replace their populations and
• 17:52
  that will not not probably be a really a really peaceful
• 17:57
  process. But the debate right now about
• 18:00
  immigration is largely There is too much illegal.
• 18:03
  Immigration 100%. So it's seen as a bad thing and
• 18:06
  it's talked about typically a negative term, which, you know,
• 18:09
  immigration can be a phenomenal. It's a necessary, I mean, I
• 18:12
  think it's a very wonderful advantage, especially to a
• 18:15
  country that has declining population.
• 18:17
  But that being said, it is talked about in a very negative
• 18:19
  way. Why do you think that is?
• 18:21
  What I think, well, I think largely in this country, the
• 18:24
  political rhetoric has been mixed up because of the illegal
• 18:27
  immigration and the way that this process is not, it's not,
• 18:30
  it's not fair, it's not safe. I think it's been largely mixed
• 18:34
  up. But then I do think that there's
• 18:36
  been a a sort of a side rhetoric which has maybe kind of got wind
• 18:41
  along with this other thing that is, I think I think deeply sort
• 18:47
  of, I think it's deeply hostile to to people who might undermine
• 18:51
  a way of life kind of thing. There's and there's been a
• 18:54
  collective memory loss of the good of of good immigration and
• 18:57
  how much that was a part of making this country great.
• 18:59
  I mean, what made this country great?
• 19:02
  And that just, I mean, I think that cuts to the core of a very
• 19:04
  deep question, which is, you know, do our our strangers
• 19:07
  threats, our our, our friendly strangers threats.
• 19:11
  You know what, how do we know? You know, what makes someone a
• 19:13
  threat? Are people a threat?
• 19:16
  And and that sort of now you know, start to go from strangers
• 19:19
  are strangers threats are friendly strangers threats are
• 19:22
  are are are your neighbors a threat?
• 19:25
  You know how many people? Is a baby a threat?
• 19:27
  Very. Big yes.
• 19:27
  And now we're getting closer and closer that that is an
• 19:30
  existential question. And I do think that it's fair to
• 19:33
  point out that for many people, an inchoate sense or a vague
• 19:37
  sense that the place they live or the city they they love is
• 19:41
  going to be inhabited by all kinds of people they don't know.
• 19:44
  I think it's related to this very existential question of how
• 19:47
  much my comfort can be, can be maybe tested, tested by other
• 19:54
  people, so, so. Is there such a thing as
• 19:58
  overpopulation? I mean, overpopulation assumes
• 20:01
  that there's too many people, so let's just say there is.
• 20:05
  Let's say everyone is having. Five children minimum, right?
• 20:09
  The population is absolutely replacing itself.
• 20:11
  It's growing and it's growing I think dramatically that that
• 20:16
  that's great, right? And again, on average, if
• 20:18
  everyone is on average having five kids, that means there's a
• 20:21
  bunch of people having like 10 kids because some people won't
• 20:23
  be able to have children or they choose not to, you know, they're
• 20:25
  not married or whatever reason. So this is an average, but let's
• 20:29
  say people on average are having big families.
• 20:32
  How would that affect, let's just talk about America.
• 20:34
  How would that affect our economy in America?
• 20:36
  You're an economist. Is that the goal?
• 20:39
  Is that a good goal to strive for?
• 20:40
  And, and are there are there side effects or disadvantages?
• 20:43
  I mean, there's certainly the population controller agenda
• 20:46
  saying, you know, well, this is going to hurt the environment.
• 20:49
  The carbon footprint is going to be insane.
• 20:51
  It's going to, you know, create climate change.
• 20:53
  It's going to destroy cities and the coastal regions.
• 20:56
  And they have, you know, heat, heat, you know, heat strike in
• 20:58
  parts of the country. It's going to transform the
• 21:00
  globe as we know it in a bad way.
• 21:02
  Yeah. What do you say to all that?
• 21:04
  Yeah, OK, so let's let's pick it apart a little bit.
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• 22:02
  order. We've experienced certainly
• 22:05
  periods of time in which population has grown rapidly and
• 22:08
  it's, you know, in historical terms, it's always been good for
• 22:11
  people. Is there overpopulation?
• 22:14
  There isn't now overpopulation. There hasn't been overpopulation
• 22:17
  in terms of not enough resources.
• 22:20
  The people that have existed have contributed to prosperity.
• 22:23
  They haven't actually undermined prosperity.
• 22:25
  And that occurs, I mean, economists believe it occurs
• 22:29
  because people are not stomachs. They're, they're also minds,
• 22:32
  right? So each person isn't just
• 22:34
  gobbling up resources, they're also consuming goods and
• 22:37
  services and they're innovating and creating and, and
• 22:39
  contributing. And what we see is that
• 22:42
  basically people contribute more in their lifetime than they take
• 22:45
  away. And that's true on the
• 22:47
  individual level of a household and a family.
• 22:49
  That's this principle, but it also turns out to be true for
• 22:52
  for countries and for nations. So that's the first point is
• 22:56
  that the population growth we've had in the past hasn't been bad
• 22:59
  for us. It's been really good for us and
• 23:01
  we could connect together. Of course, you know, the it's a
• 23:05
  little bit oversimplifying. If we thought about intellectual
• 23:08
  history, we can connect together these population bomb people
• 23:11
  like Paul Ehrlich. We can connect them together
• 23:14
  with Planned Parenthood, with the eugenics movement.
• 23:17
  I mean, kind of they're just variations on a theme, right?
• 23:20
  They're the they're playing the same tune.
• 23:22
  The same tune is that either there's too many people
• 23:25
  simplicitor that's Paul Ehrlich or your Margaret Singer and
• 23:29
  there's too many of the wrong people, right.
• 23:32
  And if the solution is always get rid of the people not kind
• 23:36
  of figure out how to solve the problem of like maybe we need
• 23:38
  better water systems here, maybe we need right?
• 23:41
  So the so the mindsets always there's a finite, like there's
• 23:43
  the working supposition, right with all of this is that there's
• 23:46
  a finite number of resources. And as you were saying, you
• 23:50
  know, people are saying they're just going to take up too many
• 23:52
  resources. And you know, Margaret Sanger,
• 23:54
  she a lot of her ideology was born out of her own family
• 23:57
  story. She was one of many children.
• 23:59
  Her parents had a lot of struggle.
• 24:00
  Her mother was very sick. Then she goes to the slums of
• 24:03
  New York. She sees, you know, immigrant
• 24:05
  children who are being raised in extreme poverty.
• 24:07
  Women are being beaten by their husbands.
• 24:09
  And she just says this whole project is ridiculous.
• 24:11
  Let's just give them birth control later, abortion, just so
• 24:13
  that they don't have kids or if they have a kid that they're
• 24:15
  wealthy enough and they have only one or two, right.
• 24:17
  And then, you know, she went on to kind of pioneer the two child
• 24:20
  policy, which China adopted later on.
• 24:23
  I mean, that was a Margaret Sanger original idea.
• 24:25
  Let's have a two child policy and the government gives you a
• 24:28
  permit to have a baby, permit to have a baby.
• 24:30
  That was literally Margaret Sanger.
• 24:32
  So. So but, but, but it's, but the
• 24:34
  whole, you know, the, the, the, the premise of all of it is
• 24:38
  there's a finite number of resources and you are an
• 24:41
  economist and you're saying that is not true.
• 24:43
  It's not true. Like for all intents and
• 24:45
  purposes, resources are infinite and it, you know, it takes a
• 24:50
  while to sort of explain that this is not intuitive.
• 24:52
  I think it's very intuitive to think about sort of these
• 24:55
  lifeboat ideas and there's fixed resources.
• 24:58
  What? There's a lot of pieces of that
• 25:00
  puzzle. One of the pieces of the one I
• 25:02
  already mentioned, that people come and they they add more
• 25:04
  resources than they take away. That's almost mysterious.
• 25:08
  You have to understand how economic growth works.
• 25:11
  So growth creates wealth. And wealth isn't the stuff.
• 25:14
  It's not the, the, the wood and the, the metals that we use and
• 25:18
  the food. That's not the wealth.
• 25:20
  The wealth is how it's combined to make life better for us, how
• 25:23
  it's used. Yeah.
• 25:24
  And So what we see over time is in fact resource transfer,
• 25:29
  referral of resources. So we don't we don't heat our
• 25:31
  homes with wood anymore. We don't burn wood anymore and
• 25:33
  we don't burn coal anymore. And those are both great things,
• 25:36
  right? So, so coal isn't the resource
• 25:38
  that it used to be. And of course, a lot of people
• 25:40
  would like to see a future in which we use even less coal.
• 25:43
  We don't use wood anymore, for sure.
• 25:45
  And So what took place, we didn't get more resources.
• 25:48
  It's not let you know people were born, we had more coal, but
• 25:51
  that in that process of more people figuring out better ways
• 25:55
  to do things, it turns out we don't need those things anymore.
• 25:58
  We can use more energy dense things.
• 26:01
  We don't like you to use so many trees to get one amount of heat,
• 26:05
  right? So we use more things that are
• 26:06
  more energy dense. The the engines that we have
• 26:09
  become more efficient and we think we're in the middle of an
• 26:11
  energy transformation now, right.
• 26:13
  So then you think, well, is that just energy?
• 26:15
  Well, no, it turns out that's true with food, it's true with
• 26:18
  land, it's true with the cleanliness of our resources
• 26:21
  that in general, as it looks as if that more people would take
• 26:25
  away, but in fact, more people make things better.
• 26:29
  They they bring down the cost of resources.
• 26:31
  And so, you know, I would be remiss if I didn't quote the
• 26:34
  work of the great, the late, great Julian Simon, who is
• 26:37
  certainly the most well known economist who did just, you
• 26:40
  know, decades of work on this question.
• 26:44
  So he uses this word that, you know, for all intents and
• 26:46
  purposes, resources are infinite, which is amazing.
• 26:49
  And it requires, you know, you look at the facts and you say,
• 26:52
  OK, why and how. So that's important to to to do.
• 26:57
  But I also want to make sure we don't miss the other reason that
• 26:59
  this is wrong. The reason that overpopulation
• 27:02
  isn't something to worry about is because people don't breed
• 27:05
  like rabbits. And this is something that's
• 27:08
  been missed by the Malthusians and the population control
• 27:11
  people. And that's maybe something we
• 27:13
  can talk more about, but it's there's never been a kind of
• 27:19
  fixed propensity. Just have a certain number of
• 27:20
  children. It's not fixed at any given
• 27:23
  moment. Every couple, every hustled,
• 27:25
  every man, woman making these decisions, they're deciding on
• 27:29
  the basis of all kinds of things like how to use their time.
• 27:33
  And of course, the reproductive revolution makes it even easier
• 27:39
  for couples to kind of decide what's valuable to them.
• 27:42
  What we have seen, for better or worse, what we've seen is that
• 27:46
  as societies become more wealthy, households choose fewer
• 27:50
  children. So there's another reason why,
• 27:53
  as kind of time marches on and resources become more abundant,
• 27:58
  they don't run out because it turns out that people have fewer
• 28:01
  children. Well, that's what I want to
• 28:03
  probe most. And your book, of course, does
• 28:04
  this because I don't think that's a good trend.
• 28:07
  I think that using our wealth to then stop having children and
• 28:11
  create more resources, the most beautiful resource in the world
• 28:14
  as a human being, like you said, there's an Infinity there.
• 28:17
  And you know, I think about something like an Elon Musk and
• 28:20
  he talks about wanting to go to Mars.
• 28:22
  He wants to build, you know, SpaceX, all this stuff.
• 28:24
  And it's like, you know, more. Let's just imagine a world where
• 28:27
  every woman did have five children plus and let's just
• 28:30
  imagine that you know enough 100 years from now, I don't know.
• 28:33
  I'm not going to be able to do the math right in this moment.
• 28:35
  You know, the global population times that over generations,
• 28:38
  let's just say that physically every, you know, square foot,
• 28:41
  there was not enough physical space, but we learned how to use
• 28:43
  the resources for enough food and, you know, organizing
• 28:47
  ourselves, etcetera, because technology gets better and
• 28:49
  better and then we do need to take over other planets do
• 28:52
  space. I mean the world's, you know,
• 28:54
  literally the Sky's the there is no limit.
• 28:56
  You say the Sky's the limit. The Sky's actually.
• 28:58
  Not the limit we've just learned and so.
• 29:00
  That's what I'm interested in because, you know, you made this
• 29:02
  comment about, you know, well, even as the culture gets wealth
• 29:05
  wealthier than they, they kind of choose to have less children.
• 29:07
  And every family has these choices.
• 29:10
  Don't you think that whole idea of like choosing to have
• 29:13
  children is such a modern idea when it comes to people who are
• 29:17
  already married? Like it was a, it was a, it was
• 29:19
  a no brainer for, you know, millennia among human beings
• 29:25
  that if especially if you're married, the project of marriage
• 29:28
  is you're open to children. You don't always get them, but
• 29:32
  you often do. And then you celebrate that and
• 29:35
  you work hard. And it's not easy.
• 29:36
  Life is not about easy. It's about meaning.
• 29:38
  And that's the way it goes. Instead of this idea of should
• 29:40
  we start our family now? How much family should we have?
• 29:43
  Will we stop our family now? I mean, these are modern
• 29:47
  questions. And yes, you can do those
• 29:49
  questions even without, you know, birth control, but even
• 29:53
  those questions without birth control, there's a, there's a,
• 29:55
  there's a premise there that says there's a premise there.
• 29:59
  What? What you?
• 30:00
  And you tackle this in the book. Yeah.
• 30:01
  So I think what you're, what you're working through.
• 30:05
  OK. So first of all, I think this is
• 30:06
  one of the hardest topics I've ever tried to think hard about,
• 30:09
  right. So I just want to say that.
• 30:11
  So thank you for thinking about it for.
• 30:12
  Me like, well, I don't know if I'm, I don't think I'm done, you
• 30:15
  know, but I, but I just want to say that because what I'm about
• 30:17
  to say may might sound overly complicated, but I think I think
• 30:22
  it's worth pausing to figure it out.
• 30:25
  And you know what? I would say that like I'm, I'm,
• 30:27
  I'm on a journey trying to figure this out.
• 30:31
  What I think we want to try to distinguish is between this
• 30:33
  modern sense that like the baby is a choice, the child is a
• 30:36
  choice. And certainly the something that
• 30:39
  you and I are both are both committed to trying to work
• 30:42
  against the baby now conceived as a choice, right?
• 30:45
  Like this is insane. Then you can abort the baby.
• 30:48
  You can opt out on the baby. Right.
• 30:50
  This baby is a life that exists. And so I think we.
• 30:53
  But obviously that thing, that abhorrent thing that conceived
• 30:57
  baby could be opted against after, after a living human
• 31:00
  being that is absolutely abhorrent.
• 31:04
  It's been wrapped up with this silly language of choice, which
• 31:07
  is absurd, right? So, OK, let's set that aside.
• 31:11
  And so, yeah, this leaning into this language of choice,
• 31:13
  reproductive choice, like all of that has become very odd.
• 31:17
  OK, But what I want to say for just a quick second, like a hot
• 31:20
  minute, take a minute. Take all the time you want.
• 31:22
  Did we? We certainly don't want to
• 31:26
  believe, but I want to point this out.
• 31:28
  We don't want to believe and I don't think it's true that
• 31:32
  childbearing was kind of animal like and not something not
• 31:39
  something that men and women made decisions about in as kind
• 31:45
  of the office of their married life.
• 31:47
  Even if that decision meant we are open to God's will for a
• 31:52
  marriage. We we know when we see that
• 31:55
  marriage is marriage is a is a choice, right?
• 31:58
  It's a choice to be married. And we affirm that, you know,
• 32:01
  every day you have to keep making that choice, not because
• 32:04
  you have some sort of choice to walk away, right?
• 32:06
  Like that's not a choice, but that you're a full agent in this
• 32:10
  thing. And that your, your
• 32:11
  responsibility comes from the fact that you need to choose to
• 32:14
  be in this. You choose to love.
• 32:15
  We say this a lot, that like love is a choice.
• 32:18
  It's not a feeling. And one of the one of the
• 32:21
  problems that I'm one of the things that I'm troubling
• 32:24
  through and I'm working through. And I think we're both in this
• 32:26
  place is that we want to at the same time reject the language of
• 32:30
  reproductive choice as it's used today because it's used in a way
• 32:33
  that isn't choice, isn't a choice.
• 32:36
  But I think what I'm discovering, thinking about the
• 32:39
  past, what did people do in the past?
• 32:42
  I don't think they just unthinkingly had children.
• 32:45
  I think they made responsible and good decisions, just as I
• 32:49
  think most people today make responsible and good decisions,
• 32:52
  but they are decisions. So we we wouldn't want to strip
• 32:55
  away from the child bearing process the importance of making
• 33:00
  a decision. And so this is the sense in
• 33:03
  which, you know, now you're sitting across from like an
• 33:06
  annoying economist who's going to say, what's the moment of
• 33:09
  choice? But I think this is, I think
• 33:11
  this is, this is an insight that, and I, I mentioned a
• 33:14
  little bit, kind of goes back to an Aristotelian conception of
• 33:18
  the person as someone who's always making a choice for the
• 33:21
  perceived good, right? And, and so this is the, it's
• 33:25
  only when you start to view the, I would say the drama of the, of
• 33:29
  the inner person that you can reject this Malthusian idea.
• 33:33
  It's really important to reject that because what Margaret
• 33:36
  Sanger basically thinks is that poor people are just going to
• 33:39
  copulate and have children like animals, and Malthus basically
• 33:42
  thinks that anybody who can will copulate and have children like
• 33:45
  animals. Oh, and I think that of of kids
• 33:46
  too. Like kids are so sexual, so just
• 33:49
  give them condoms and it's like there's a choice you can make to
• 33:52
  not have. Sex, that's a choice, right?
• 33:54
  Exactly. So like we, we think about like
• 33:56
  what's behavior. Behavior is like, it comes out
• 33:58
  of this, the drama of human choice and that choice has to be
• 34:01
  formed. Hopefully it is formed and
• 34:03
  informed by the right things and our consciences are formed
• 34:06
  properly. So, OK, so that's the way I want
• 34:10
  to untangle this. So I certainly agree with you
• 34:13
  entirely that this modern notion of reproductive choice is, is
• 34:17
  not helpful, hasn't been helpful.
• 34:19
  On the other hand, I definitely want to cultivate and bring to
• 34:24
  the forefront an element that I think has been been lost.
• 34:28
  And the reason it's important to do that is because it's exactly
• 34:31
  the key to, to, to sort of going forward today.
• 34:34
  It's the key, right? Because we're not like Lab Rats.
• 34:38
  If we were Lab Rats, we could kind of put a little bit more
• 34:41
  sugar in the water. Or we could like, you know,
• 34:43
  nudge us into some kind of place.
• 34:45
  We could just apply the right treatment to the rats and we'll
• 34:48
  all start having a few more babies.
• 34:50
  Like it's like something we can adjust, like almost like pulling
• 34:53
  the levers. If instead, what is the key to
• 34:57
  the decisions that we make about children is something that's
• 35:00
  really in this drama of value, what do people value, then
• 35:05
  that's the way to sort of go at the problem.
• 35:07
  So one final piece to talk about the past.
• 35:10
  So I think in cultures prior to our own where we were less
• 35:13
  wealthy, why do people have children?
• 35:16
  Did they have children because they didn't know how to not have
• 35:17
  children? And I think the answer is that's
• 35:20
  not right. I think people had children
• 35:22
  because children were deeply valuable in ways that they're
• 35:26
  not today. And I think that's really
• 35:28
  important to emphasize. If you lived in a farm, you had
• 35:32
  lots of domestic animals you had to take, you know, you better
• 35:35
  have more than one kid, right? And so we like to think like,
• 35:38
  well, they just didn't know how to not have children.
• 35:40
  Is is that the case? Are you saying they were
• 35:42
  economically? Economically valid children.
• 35:44
  You couldn't have a good life. You'd be like, you're going to
• 35:47
  do all of the care of all the domestic animals by yourself.
• 35:50
  Actually, you'd have a better life as an adult human being if
• 35:53
  you had more children. Now, I'm not saying that
• 35:57
  cultures in the past where children were valued
• 36:00
  economically in that sense or they, you know, I don't mean
• 36:02
  that they that they were valuable as an objective fact.
• 36:06
  They made it easier to take care of farms and households.
• 36:08
  They took care of you in your old age.
• 36:10
  We didn't have pension programs and big savings accounts and.
• 36:14
  Retirement high, yeah, and. So if you are going to count
• 36:17
  your children to take care of you, this is a very economic
• 36:21
  reason. We would call that an economic
• 36:22
  reason. So children brought value to the
• 36:26
  household in a way that they certainly don't today.
• 36:29
  I think if we look at the past and we sort of assume, oh,
• 36:32
  everybody really treasured children for their own sake in
• 36:34
  the past, I think that's facile. I'm not convinced that that
• 36:38
  would be clear. And there are lots of times in
• 36:40
  human history where different cultures have have rejected the
• 36:44
  idea of having children or thought that would be better to,
• 36:46
  you know, certainly expose the weak and the vulnerable.
• 36:50
  We've had religious sects who got into thinking that, you
• 36:52
  know, maybe not being married was a better idea, you know, you
• 36:56
  know, all these sorts of things. So I think fundamentally when
• 36:59
  you look at like even 200 years ago in this country, children
• 37:02
  were, were valuable in, in ways that they're not today.
• 37:06
  So I'm, I'm not sure I would, would want to be so quick to
• 37:10
  look at today's young people, young adults trying to make
• 37:13
  decisions about when to have children.
• 37:14
  You look at somebody who's 282930, there's certainly no
• 37:18
  part of them that's going to sit down and think, well, our life
• 37:20
  would be a lot better if we had a couple more kids.
• 37:24
  Did you know that every year 200,000 families go bankrupt
• 37:28
  from medical bills? Even with health insurance?
• 37:31
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• 37:34
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• 37:37
  which is an alternative model for paying for your healthcare.
• 37:40
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• 37:43
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• 37:46
  help cover your bills. The Crowd Health community has
• 37:49
  fully funded more than 5000 medical bills over the last two
• 37:52
  years. This includes accidents like a
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  Join Crowd health.com. There's certainly no part of
• 38:25
  them that's going to sit down and think, well, our life would
• 38:26
  be a lot better if we had a couple more kids.
• 38:30
  Meaning once they've had their one or their two.
• 38:32
  Once they've, I mean. I think there's a lot of people
• 38:35
  today that they want to like cross the threshold of having a
• 38:38
  child or maybe up to three. Like that's that's pretty
• 38:42
  average, you know, one or two because it's a kind of a coming
• 38:45
  of age. There's there's there's so much
• 38:47
  beauty in a kid. I mean, even the modern person,
• 38:49
  we see that. And so there's this.
• 38:52
  I think it is baked in as much as some of this other stuff is
• 38:55
  baked in. It is baked in that you know,
• 38:56
  one or two or three might be a great.
• 38:58
  Thing So I am definitely not here to say that there are sort
• 39:02
  of non economic reasons to have children.
• 39:03
  I think there are, but I think that it's it's it's powerful to
• 39:08
  look at the last couple of 100 years and see, OK, there are
• 39:13
  intrinsic reasons to have children.
• 39:16
  Children are intrinsically good. They're good in themselves.
• 39:19
  And even if they brought you no benefit, even if it was a lot of
• 39:22
  hardship, there's a very strong case to have children.
• 39:26
  And we could make that case. There's also in times past
• 39:30
  economic reasons to have children.
• 39:31
  So what we're seeing today, I really think is the strip.
• 39:35
  We've stripped away all the non economic reasons.
• 39:37
  And so what's left is who's having children?
• 39:39
  People who've become very persuaded, either from their own
• 39:42
  background or from a religious conversion that children are
• 39:46
  intrinsically worth having and they're worth rearranging your
• 39:48
  life to get going on that project, you know, younger,
• 39:51
  rather than waiting until you're 39 to just have one.
• 39:55
  And so that's, I think that's the big message is that actually
• 39:58
  if you want to find out who's resisting this birth rate
• 40:00
  decline, it's people who have some other reason besides an
• 40:04
  economic reason to have children.
• 40:06
  So who are these? Groups that are having children,
• 40:10
  well, the shorthand message is they're devout religious people.
• 40:17
  The longer message is not of anyone particular faith.
• 40:21
  So when I say devout, they tend to be people who believe a very
• 40:26
  specific two or three things about children and marriage.
• 40:30
  And you can find them among many faiths.
• 40:33
  And I found them all across the country, LDS, Jewish, Catholic,
• 40:37
  Baptist, Presbyterian, I mean all manner of, of different
• 40:42
  Christian churches. But in none of these churches
• 40:45
  does it seem to be that everybody believes this.
• 40:47
  And so it's not just religiousness.
• 40:49
  That's a it's a very specific set of beliefs that I think when
• 40:53
  I when I say them, they sound pretty biblical, which is why I
• 40:56
  invoke the biblical Hannah in this book.
• 40:59
  There are people who believe that children are blessings.
• 41:02
  Get it out of your mouth. You go like, oh, is that all
• 41:04
  what you're really telling me that could be the key.
• 41:06
  And you say, well, doesn't everybody think children are
• 41:09
  blessings? Well, maybe not, not in the way
• 41:13
  that these women do. So one of the ways I help to
• 41:16
  give people a sense of what do they mean when they say their
• 41:18
  blessings? They believe children are
• 41:20
  blessings in exactly the way that someone might think wealth
• 41:24
  is a blessing, right. So you'd never say, you know,
• 41:27
  I'm kind of done accumulating wealth like I'm done I'm which
• 41:30
  enough. Once or twice you hear someone
• 41:32
  say that, you know, like that's it.
• 41:34
  I, I can't accumulate anymore. I'm going to give it away but.
• 41:36
  Or they might say I hit 1015 million, I don't know.
• 41:39
  And they're like, I have enough to live off so I'm going to stop
• 41:41
  trying. That's right.
• 41:42
  And when we remember that wealth isn't just money or cash money
• 41:46
  or assets, it could be many different things actually
• 41:50
  defined more, more metaphysically.
• 41:52
  No one's done being wealthy and no one's done being healthy.
• 41:56
  No one says I'm as fit as I need to be.
• 41:58
  Like I'm done. I could kind of slack off now,
• 42:00
  like if I go back to my old life, health and wealth aren't
• 42:04
  the types of things that you ever think you'd be done having.
• 42:06
  So. So when I say these are women
• 42:08
  who think children are blessings, they mean it in that
• 42:10
  way. And they didn't think, in the
• 42:13
  words of one woman I interviewed, they didn't think
• 42:15
  you could have too many children any more than you could be too
• 42:18
  wealthy or too healthy. And so that's where I say, well,
• 42:22
  yeah, everybody says that their children are blessings in a in a
• 42:26
  maybe a trite way or cliche way, But this is what they meant.
• 42:30
  They really believe that each extra child, intrinsically
• 42:34
  different from the last one, unique, has a divine purpose,
• 42:37
  brings a gift to the world that no other child could bring.
• 42:40
  So those are the kinds of things.
• 42:42
  These are very biblical notions. They didn't all use exactly the
• 42:46
  same language, but there was a lot of overlap.
• 42:49
  So that they believe that children are blessings,
• 42:51
  expressions of God's goodness, and the purpose of their
• 42:54
  marriages. And I think that last one is
• 42:57
  important to say it just kind of the core of the thing, you know,
• 43:02
  how did people get there? Well, that's really interesting.
• 43:05
  Not everybody grew up in a big religious family.
• 43:07
  Some people had a religious conversion and came to believe
• 43:11
  that, then had a few kids and went, yeah, it's all true.
• 43:13
  Everything that I believe is true, I'm going to keep going.
• 43:16
  Other women grew up in large families and came at marriage
• 43:21
  and motherhood already knowing, like, this is the best thing you
• 43:24
  can do in life. I'm going to try to have as many
• 43:27
  as God will send me. I might say try, right?
• 43:29
  Because as you said, you can't go buy children.
• 43:32
  They you. You may want them, you may be
• 43:34
  open to them, but they're a gift.
• 43:37
  So I, you know, it's so baked in in our culture today to not see
• 43:41
  children that way. And I actually personally
• 43:44
  encounter this. I'm going to guess you might
• 43:46
  too. But I personally encounter this
• 43:47
  virtually every time I go somewhere public with my only
• 43:50
  three children. I only have three people, but
• 43:53
  I'm youngish and I've got 3 and they're all little.
• 43:56
  And virtually every time I got in public with my kids, they're
• 43:59
  a kind word spoken. They're so cute.
• 44:00
  Look at that. But then there's always a
• 44:02
  question or a comment in this vein.
• 44:05
  Three, you've got your hands fold.
• 44:07
  Are you? Or you got your girl.
• 44:09
  Are you done? I was going to say that's the
• 44:11
  language. Are you done?
• 44:12
  Or three, that's a lot, you know, I have one or two, you
• 44:15
  know, like so, you know, and then I, I often, I, I always
• 44:19
  say, oh, I hope we have more. I would love to have more.
• 44:23
  And they look at me and, and as if I'm an like a, an alien.
• 44:27
  And again, this is like 95% of people that I encounter who has
• 44:31
  some kind of conversation with me about my kids just out in the
• 44:34
  in the world. And and I know many other women
• 44:36
  who have similar experiences. And again, it's not that people
• 44:39
  are trying to be mean or impolite.
• 44:40
  This is literally how they make small talk because it's baked
• 44:44
  in. It's.
• 44:45
  Completely baked in this idea. Of child is this like big, big
• 44:50
  deal to the point that you know, you would have a child and then
• 44:52
  if you have two or three, and again, I only have three, you
• 44:56
  know, think about the mom who was six or you of eight, right
• 44:59
  or more that it is kind of a shocker.
• 45:02
  It's a shocker you would have so many kids, why would you?
• 45:06
  Do that. How do we get to the point where
• 45:09
  instead of children, and again, I don't want to use that
• 45:11
  language either because to your point, it's it's it's important
• 45:13
  to not use that language because it's not like, oh, 100 years
• 45:15
  ago, everyone understood children were a blessing.
• 45:18
  I don't know that that's necessarily true.
• 45:19
  They understood they were economically important, but did
• 45:22
  it. I don't want to pretend like the
• 45:23
  past is perfect and we we're now on this devolved, you know,
• 45:26
  devolution has happened. But the reality is the truth is
• 45:31
  that children are blessings. But we don't see that truth
• 45:34
  today. And it's very baked in for even
• 45:36
  good people to not see that truth.
• 45:37
  Yeah. Can you believe that?
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• 46:09
  Well, I want to help, help out your history for a minute.
• 46:11
  So I think the, I think those cultures didn't have children
• 46:15
  necessarily for these lofty reasons.
• 46:18
  But when you're in a culture where people have a higher birth
• 46:21
  rate, it becomes more apparent to people because, in fact, it
• 46:24
  doesn't take you that long to see, like, initially you're
• 46:27
  like, well, this is a lot of work.
• 46:28
  And I don't know, this baby isn't even smiling at me.
• 46:30
  And then as the child gets older, you're kind of like, oh,
• 46:32
  my goodness, wow. Like this is the best thing
• 46:34
  ever, right? In cultures where people have
• 46:36
  more children, it becomes more apparent that children are
• 46:38
  blessings. And so I, I, I don't necessarily
• 46:41
  want to completely say that people didn't think that, but
• 46:45
  that it wouldn't have been easier to maintain that.
• 46:47
  I think they did. It's a good point, but the, the
• 46:49
  what gets you out of bed? Like what?
• 46:51
  Sorry, what gets this thing going?
• 46:52
  It's like if you had to force me into an ice bath, which I
• 46:55
  apparently people do this for health, but it would you would
• 46:58
  take a lot. You'd really have to push me in
• 47:00
  there. And so I think people needed
• 47:02
  that push. Like the economic your point is,
• 47:07
  I think I think it's the money point that the reflexive thought
• 47:11
  of our culture is that having children is something that has
• 47:15
  to be done at some point. And it reveals that same idea
• 47:19
  about family. It's not even it's not even the
• 47:24
  material resources. Many people look at you with
• 47:27
  your 3. I know.
• 47:30
  It's the money. It is, it is so sad.
• 47:32
  It's the money point. And they think, how can you love
• 47:35
  more than more than three? Like, how could you, how can you
• 47:37
  even love three? Like how do you have enough
• 47:39
  attention and how do you have enough like gift of your, how do
• 47:44
  you have enough of yourself to do this right?
• 47:46
  I, I just think that's for me, that was like where I got what I
• 47:50
  got out of this was like, that's the, that's the point.
• 47:53
  And actually that point, we all, we all didn't believe it, but we
• 47:58
  did actually buy into this idea that there's a fixed number of
• 48:03
  people you can love. Like great, like that's it.
• 48:07
  You're at your point, your maximum.
• 48:09
  You can't love another child. I think that God is good to us
• 48:12
  in the way that he designed the world in such a way that we can
• 48:15
  learn from the things we can see about the things we can't see.
• 48:20
  I think that's so important. So just as the material like,
• 48:23
  as, as the human population has grown, I mean, look at the world
• 48:27
  we live in, right? I mean, you know, not
• 48:28
  everything's perfect, but the, the vast number of people who
• 48:33
  live at a standard of living, this is wonderful at a standard
• 48:36
  of living that was not imaginable by kings and Queens,
• 48:39
  you know, 400 years ago. We're all like the little,
• 48:42
  little me. I'm driving around in this, you
• 48:44
  know, not an expensive car, but it just, I'm sure it's easier
• 48:47
  than a horse and buggy. I mean, there's so many
• 48:49
  beautiful things. Can you can you share briefly on
• 48:52
  that? Just to pause for a moment
• 48:53
  because I, I should have asked about this earlier, but it's
• 48:55
  such an important point just about the standard of living for
• 48:59
  like the hot populations, you know, this idea of like hunger
• 49:03
  and people not having basic necessities that we've got.
• 49:07
  There's a there's a website called human progress dot or
• 49:09
  you're probably familiar with a track this, but could you share
• 49:12
  just a couple briefly? Right.
• 49:14
  I mean just maybe 11 data point that would be really helpful.
• 49:18
  If you just look at the, the the century from 1900 to 2000.
• 49:21
  So now this is already 25 years behind us.
• 49:25
  The end of that century, At the beginning of that century, if
• 49:28
  you looked at the number of people in the around the world
• 49:32
  who are in poverty, like a kind of poverty level, you'd be
• 49:37
  looking at, you know, depending on the measure, somewhere
• 49:39
  between 80 and 90% of the world. And in poverty by the end of
• 49:43
  that 100 years. This is the nature of economic
• 49:46
  growth, human progress. By the end of that 100 years, it
• 49:49
  had completely flipped around to the point where it would be
• 49:52
  like, you know, 10 to 15% in poverty and the 80 to 90% out of
• 49:57
  poverty and not necessarily just just over the threshold, but you
• 50:02
  know, really, really successfully out of poverty.
• 50:04
  So and then we've made tremendous gains even since the
• 50:06
  year 2000. So in the last 25 years, I don't
• 50:08
  want to neglect that lap, but that is just a, if you look at
• 50:11
  those graphs and you can find them on our world and data has
• 50:13
  some beautiful graphs about, about this sort of thing.
• 50:16
  And I, I think we have to celebrate that.
• 50:17
  I know that a lot of people get worried about, you know, the
• 50:20
  materialism and, and the things that are inherent in, in wealth.
• 50:23
  But from my perspective, economic growth is, is what God
• 50:28
  intended for the world for the sake of people, is how, how
• 50:32
  should we expect our families to grow and our marriages to be
• 50:36
  generative and and generous. And that way, if it isn't the
• 50:39
  case that God provided some mechanism.
• 50:43
  And so, So what I was going to say then, and I think it's worth
• 50:46
  just now that we see that jump, it's so huge, right to go from
• 50:50
  90% poor to 10% poor, right? That to that's astonishing right
• 50:57
  to go that this reveals something about the spiritual
• 51:01
  life and about because the most we all kind of get it like you
• 51:05
  want to provide food and resources and shelter and a good
• 51:08
  education for your children and that costs money wherever you
• 51:11
  are, but you also want to give your kids love and attention and
• 51:15
  a relationship. And I think a lot of people are
• 51:18
  worried about that. But in fact, in fact, it looks
• 51:23
  like your heart grows that the hidden world that we don't see
• 51:28
  our capacity to Love Actually can grow.
• 51:31
  We're not fixed. And that's shocking.
• 51:34
  It's actually kind of shocking, right?
• 51:36
  Because I think most of us think of ourselves as like some kind
• 51:38
  of spirit thing that's like a thing inhabiting our bodies that
• 51:41
  are like, but our soul, our hearts actually can grow.
• 51:44
  And so as we have more children, you know, when that person who
• 51:48
  looks at you and aren't you done, it's kind of like, why
• 51:51
  would I want to be done? This is the best thing ever.
• 51:53
  And then you just discover that you, you can love, you can love
• 51:58
  more. And you didn't know you could
• 51:59
  love more because I don't know, I know about you.
• 52:01
  But when my first baby, I thought I couldn't love anybody
• 52:03
  like this again, like this is it, This is the pinnacle of the
• 52:06
  love you could experience, you know, And then you do have a
• 52:08
  second child, You go, wait, wow. Oh my goodness, I can love this
• 52:11
  one too. And it's, it's even bigger
• 52:13
  because now there's like a whole thing, there's like this whole
• 52:15
  Nexus of, of love that we're all loving each other and it's
• 52:18
  amazing. So this is really interesting,
• 52:21
  that just as just as more people don't deprive us of material
• 52:27
  resources, more people don't deprive us of our ability to
• 52:30
  love them. You said something really
• 52:32
  interesting. I mean, all this is interesting,
• 52:34
  but earlier when we're talking about, you know, I was thinking
• 52:36
  specifically about being at a clothing store with the kids.
• 52:38
  And then this lady was saying, you know, are you done and all
• 52:42
  of this? And you said, well, because they
• 52:43
  can't imagine being able to love more than one, two or three.
• 52:47
  I think there's other things that may be at work, and I know
• 52:49
  you've studied this, which are other maybe some existential
• 52:53
  fears about the world being overpopulated, climate change.
• 52:57
  So I think that's a maybe a small category against the
• 53:00
  category. What are the different
• 53:02
  categories that you have studied about the reasons people say
• 53:06
  that they don't want children or they only want one or two?
• 53:09
  And then another question. This is complex, but that's what
• 53:13
  they're saying. Maybe if they're surveyed, but
• 53:16
  maybe the operational beliefs that they're they have that they
• 53:19
  don't know that they have are the reason that they're actually
• 53:22
  not having the children or not having more than one or two.
• 53:25
  Yeah, that's right. And also I'm combining
• 53:27
  categories that I probably shouldn't combine.
• 53:29
  The reasons of the people not having any kids is probably a
• 53:31
  little different than those that are just having the one or the.
• 53:33
  2 So this is, but they're both great questions, and I'm going
• 53:36
  to mostly refer you to other work.
• 53:39
  It took me so long to do this project.
• 53:40
  I haven't spent a lot of time interviewing people yet who
• 53:43
  don't have children or don't want children or don't want
• 53:45
  children yet. I just heard it on the airplane
• 53:47
  on the way here. Like flying here, I had my
• 53:50
  earbuds in and but I could still hear like the, the aisle across,
• 53:53
  you know, there was a conversation.
• 53:55
  It was people who didn't know each other.
• 53:56
  So the one lady was talking to a couple.
• 53:58
  And, you know, it was like, at some point it got around to,
• 54:01
  well, you know, you've been married for five years.
• 54:03
  Do you want kids? And I, I was like, of course, my
• 54:06
  ears perked up and I waited for it.
• 54:07
  It was like, not sure, not sure. And.
• 54:11
  Was the person like in their 30s?
• 54:14
  Yeah. And I just thought this is so,
• 54:16
  this is so the reality, this is so what's happening, It's baked
• 54:19
  in. They don't know.
• 54:20
  There's a lot of uncertainty. Not sure, I think and not sure.
• 54:24
  It goes on and on and on. It goes on.
• 54:26
  And then, you know, like then it's maybe you're 39.
• 54:28
  And it's like, maybe I'm just going to try that.
• 54:32
  Not sure. I think is a really great
• 54:34
  summary of of where we are. So I haven't studied it
• 54:38
  directly. When I began this project, the
• 54:40
  intention was to go through all the different categories, not
• 54:42
  just to do the high fertility, like, you know, people have a
• 54:45
  lot of kids, but actually to, to to look at all the contours of
• 54:49
  American family life and to talk to people who've never wanted
• 54:51
  children. I haven't gotten there yet.
• 54:53
  This took long enough. I'll get there, but I want to
• 54:57
  refer you to another book, which I think is a little bit sober,
• 55:01
  but but I think really gets at what you just asked.
• 55:03
  It's called What Are Children For to philosophers Anastasia
• 55:07
  Berg and Rachel Wiseman. And they really do a tour of of
• 55:12
  this sort. They interview people who are
• 55:14
  very unsure. And so they cover all those
• 55:16
  categories. What are the things people say?
• 55:18
  But as philosophers, they kind of push and they go a little bit
• 55:21
  deeper. And it does seem, I mean, their
• 55:23
  were, their work really sort of reveals that it really seems to
• 55:27
  come down to this basic question of do they think life is
• 55:30
  valuable? Do they think their own lives
• 55:32
  are so valuable that they would want to reproduce them?
• 55:35
  I think that's a really, really interesting question.
• 55:38
  So it does seem that people need more than an assurance that they
• 55:43
  can afford children economically, which is not to
• 55:47
  not to make light of the fact that many people would like to
• 55:50
  have a better economy or better resources to raise their
• 55:53
  families, but that there's a that when people, I will, I'll
• 55:56
  put it this way. When, when people say I can't
• 55:58
  afford to have children, the language of affordability often
• 56:02
  can mask many things, right? So I can't afford maybe the
• 56:05
  cash. That might be one thing, might
• 56:07
  not be entirely true. Of course, in the first cut, you
• 56:10
  might say, well, but could you buy less of this and more you
• 56:14
  could, could you reallocate the things you're already spending
• 56:16
  on children? Of course, most people probably
• 56:18
  could. But then there's like a deeper
• 56:20
  sense of affordability, right, Which is your time, your energy.
• 56:24
  So it's more like lifestyle affordability or identity
• 56:27
  affordability because you actually pay for your children
• 56:30
  with those things. You pay for your children with
• 56:34
  yourself. Where do you think we got these
• 56:37
  standards for what is seen as the good life?
• 56:41
  You know, I think there's such a sense today of the good life.
• 56:44
  And I, I mean, social media can often get blamed or media in
• 56:47
  general because we're, there's all these, you know, that are
• 56:49
  about the unrealistic expectations and pictures
• 56:51
  painted for women, especially about lifestyle, the home, their
• 56:55
  parents, right? The perfect relationship, the
• 56:58
  perfect career, whatever. And so if they are not achieving
• 57:01
  certain things in their own life, then they're more hesitant
• 57:03
  to have a child at all, or even one or two or maybe beyond that.
• 57:08
  I think we're, we're digging deeply.
• 57:10
  I mean, this is like, where is like, where does this come from?
• 57:12
  You know, And of course we could point to things on the surface,
• 57:15
  but I, I feel like the better, the better place to dig a little
• 57:19
  bit. And I'm speculating we're really
• 57:22
  looking at the first generation of, of 20 somethings and 30
• 57:26
  somethings. I cannot remember which
• 57:27
  generations I'm supposed to call them anymore.
• 57:29
  Gen. Z and Millennials.
• 57:31
  And then what's the next one after alphas?
• 57:33
  But the ZS in the millennials are the first generation of
• 57:37
  where we've had the majority of those generations grew up with
• 57:40
  some form of family dysfunction. And I think that family
• 57:44
  dysfunction is the kind of thing which makes you really struggle
• 57:48
  to figure out if you want to start a family, right?
• 57:51
  This is right. This is the, the, the divorce
• 57:54
  revolution is really when it's really like the 1970s into the
• 57:58
  80s. That's that's the time when the
• 58:00
  divorce that we, we had no fault divorce, right?
• 58:04
  And then we see this big backlog of divorces that people wanted
• 58:08
  for dumb reasons. And those come those, those
• 58:10
  happen. And then then you see in the
• 58:11
  1980s, this big argument in favor of the good divorce.
• 58:14
  We kind of right. So it, I mean, my best
• 58:17
  explanation is it's people carrying the wounds of a family
• 58:21
  dysfunction. We know now that the experience
• 58:25
  of, of loss that adults carry with them from childhood, from
• 58:30
  childhood divorces and family separations, It's, it's
• 58:33
  profound. And it doesn't end, doesn't end
• 58:35
  when you're 18, like some magic number, right?
• 58:38
  It doesn't end, you know, a few years after the divorce.
• 58:40
  It's something you carry with you into adulthood.
• 58:43
  The work of Judith Wallerstein, I think, is not widely
• 58:46
  circulated enough. And she said, I'm stunned, I
• 58:49
  cannot believe it that you've got people who are in their 30s
• 58:51
  and 40s afraid to start a family because they aren't, they don't
• 58:55
  want to do to their children what their parents did to them.
• 58:58
  And I feel like that's got to be something we have to tap.
• 59:02
  I mean, that with the tap is, but then, you know, you're
• 59:04
  looking at something. Again, it's not an easy
• 59:05
  solution, but there's a lot of pain behind.
• 59:09
  There's a lot of pain and suffering behind.
• 59:10
  I'm not sure I want to have a kid.
• 59:14
  What was the one of the most surprising things that you or
• 59:18
  was there something that was surprised you that you
• 59:20
  encountered in your interviews with these, you know, women who
• 59:26
  broke out of that mindset? I mean, and I want an additional
• 59:31
  question. I'm keep doubling up on you, but
• 59:33
  were these, were any of them the children of divorced parents?
• 59:37
  And did that come into? Yeah, so I'll go in, I'll go in
• 59:42
  order. Well, I'll go in backwards order
• 59:43
  of just yeah, there, there were many, many of the moms I
• 59:46
  interviewed were children of divorce in particular.
• 59:51
  It comes out in in the very last chapter, chapter.
• 59:53
  I think it's chapter 18 movie chapter 17.
• 59:57
  I get River. It's the story of Leah.
• 59:59
  So Leah's a beautiful testimony. Her her story is amazing.
• 1:00:04
  Her reflections on what it means to have children are just
• 1:00:06
  incredibly deep and beautiful. And she meant, she says at some
• 1:00:09
  point that that she just really wants to explain that her
• 1:00:14
  commitment as a Jewish woman to building a family that's
• 1:00:18
  permanent. Really a lot of that is born
• 1:00:21
  born, she says, as a child of divorce, I saw that it was
• 1:00:24
  important to put the put the family 1st and put children 1st.
• 1:00:28
  And so it's clear that in some cases it can work out that that
• 1:00:33
  can motivate. You know, people talk in
• 1:00:34
  psychology about modeling and remodeling and that many people
• 1:00:39
  can remodel. They, they, they saw modeling is
• 1:00:42
  when you see your parents do things, you think they're pretty
• 1:00:44
  good, but a lot of people don't want to do the same things your
• 1:00:48
  parents did. And so they remodeling is what
• 1:00:50
  you do. When you say, I'm going to do it
• 1:00:52
  different, I'm going to give my kids something better and
• 1:00:53
  different. But clearly it, it's more effort
• 1:00:57
  to have to remodel than to just go, oh, you know, I have amazing
• 1:01:01
  parents and I hope I could just do everything that they did
• 1:01:03
  right. So there were definitely some
• 1:01:05
  people who had been, had been disappointed by their family
• 1:01:08
  background and they had a story about what they were doing
• 1:01:12
  differently. Like, so Leah talks about how
• 1:01:14
  she met her husband in college. They're pretty secular and they,
• 1:01:18
  they they were drawn to a live, she says, a life of religious
• 1:01:21
  seriousness and purpose so that they could build this family
• 1:01:24
  that they didn't have. So there's a real sense I want
• 1:01:27
  to do something different. I want to put the family first,
• 1:01:30
  but I'm, it's something I have confidence I can do because of
• 1:01:33
  God and because of the, the resources of the church, or in
• 1:01:36
  her case, her synagogue. So that's the first, that's the
• 1:01:40
  first point. Others, by the way, who had no
• 1:01:44
  siblings growing up and for whom that was a really big motivator.
• 1:01:47
  They said, like I thought, like obviously I'd like to give this
• 1:01:50
  to my children. The other question you asked,
• 1:01:54
  well it was. Surprising to you?
• 1:01:55
  It was. There was something surprising.
• 1:01:56
  To you, there were tons of things that were surprising.
• 1:01:58
  To me, in a sense, the whole book was surprising.
• 1:02:00
  And that's not interesting coming from someone you know
• 1:02:02
  yourself had a kid, so I have. A friend on on X on Twitter who
• 1:02:05
  keeps pushing me like tell me what was surprising?
• 1:02:07
  Didn't you already know this? I said, no, I didn't know this.
• 1:02:10
  I mean, I think that sometimes, sometimes it's it's it's
• 1:02:14
  incredibly interesting to hear how other people put it right
• 1:02:18
  because something that's deep and good.
• 1:02:19
  This is the thing that's hard to put into words, right, which is
• 1:02:22
  that the truth is harder to to talk about then like it's hard
• 1:02:27
  to describe beauty, like ugliness is easy.
• 1:02:30
  You just, you can point to it. But what makes something
• 1:02:33
  beautiful? Let's that's, you know, I'm not
• 1:02:34
  a philosopher, but that's a hard thing to describe.
• 1:02:37
  The truth is more, more difficult.
• 1:02:40
  Fallacies are easy, right? They're easy because they
• 1:02:43
  they're just like a a simplification of something.
• 1:02:46
  So things that are noble and beautiful and true and good,
• 1:02:50
  like the intrinsic value of children and why you might
• 1:02:52
  organize your life around these children.
• 1:02:56
  There are many ways to talk about that.
• 1:02:58
  And I didn't most of what I put in that book I didn't already
• 1:03:01
  have at the tip of my tongue. So it was a real gift to me to
• 1:03:05
  hear back from people and go, well, yeah, I agree with that.
• 1:03:08
  And that's so beautiful. And I wouldn't have, I wouldn't
• 1:03:11
  have said that. So, So in a sense, every,
• 1:03:13
  everything, maybe many things. I'll just note a couple things.
• 1:03:17
  One was the way in which women of many different faiths, all in
• 1:03:22
  a sense with a, with a, an Abrahamic tradition, but women
• 1:03:27
  who went to different churches had obviously very different
• 1:03:30
  scriptures and approaches to reading Scripture kept coming
• 1:03:34
  back to the same set of themes. That was to me surprising and I
• 1:03:38
  don't know that I expected it right.
• 1:03:40
  So this language of, of rejecting a certain kind of
• 1:03:44
  planning mentality and that, you know, we've, we haven't talked
• 1:03:47
  about that part of this yet, but it's, of course, it's connected
• 1:03:51
  to this assumption that resources are going to be scarce
• 1:03:54
  and that there's, you know, people are going to, you know,
• 1:03:56
  like this whole, this mechanical idea of how people get born.
• 1:04:00
  Then the next thing you say is, well, if people are just going
• 1:04:03
  to come into the world in this mechanical way, we now we have
• 1:04:06
  to plan it subjected to human wisdom.
• 1:04:09
  So that Planned Parenthood mentality, population control
• 1:04:12
  mentality is just that. And So what I really heard
• 1:04:16
  across the sample of all women of all these different faiths
• 1:04:18
  was a rejection of that kind of, but with very similar language
• 1:04:23
  that a rejection of planning. So it wasn't like I'm choosing
• 1:04:26
  this number of children in favor of a kind of deference to, to to
• 1:04:31
  God's Providence. So a kind of openness to
• 1:04:33
  children rather than unintentional like consumer
• 1:04:37
  mentality, like I'm choosing 3 or I'm choosing.
• 1:04:39
  So in that sense, you know, back to your point earlier, I, I,
• 1:04:42
  that was not part of this was I'm choosing X number of
• 1:04:45
  children. And so was the challenge of the
• 1:04:48
  book was to try to figure out how to describe openness in a
• 1:04:51
  way that didn't sound as if people weren't using their minds
• 1:04:54
  or, or making a choice, right. So you're fully, fully
• 1:04:58
  participating kind of with God's Providence that they, God wanted
• 1:05:02
  their yes, he wanted their readiness and he respected
• 1:05:04
  their, their need to be ready. So that was so hard to describe,
• 1:05:08
  but I, I tried, but it was really surprising to me and I
• 1:05:12
  did not expect it. I remember very specific
• 1:05:14
  interviews where I went, wow, you know, I'm talking to a
• 1:05:17
  Jewish woman in the Northeast and you know, 3 weeks later, 3
• 1:05:22
  weeks ago, I was talking to Al DS lady in in Salt Lake and you
• 1:05:26
  just described this process of knowing when to have your next
• 1:05:30
  child in almost the same terms. That's amazing.
• 1:05:33
  And just to be clear, when you say knowing when to have your
• 1:05:35
  next child, because we were kind of going back and forth about
• 1:05:38
  this earlier, which is, you know, babies don't just
• 1:05:41
  magically appear. And we're not animals that just
• 1:05:43
  copulate because we can't help ourselves.
• 1:05:45
  We choose to, you know, Make Love with our spouse.
• 1:05:47
  That is a choice on any given week or day.
• 1:05:49
  And and then also in that sense, we choose to be open to life.
• 1:05:53
  And then obviously people who use birth control can choose not
• 1:05:55
  or not to use it or to use contraception, I should call it.
• 1:05:59
  So when you're, when you're talking to these women and
• 1:06:02
  they're saying that they were, they felt a sense it was, they
• 1:06:05
  were ready to have their next child.
• 1:06:06
  It was time. So, so, so was there planning
• 1:06:11
  happening? So one lady said planned, not
• 1:06:14
  planned something like that. Another said planned by God, but
• 1:06:19
  there was planning. I would like to say that there
• 1:06:21
  was planning and that's the only, that's the only language
• 1:06:24
  we have for this. Sometimes people will talk about
• 1:06:26
  birth spacing. Maybe intentionality is a better
• 1:06:29
  word. That is the whole idea.
• 1:06:30
  Yeah, this is very intentional that no baby was sort of an
• 1:06:34
  accident. You're like, oh, this was an
• 1:06:35
  accident. But because it was part of a
• 1:06:37
  larger project, which is this was that they went into the
• 1:06:40
  project of marriage saying the project of marriage is children
• 1:06:43
  are a blessing and so we'll be open to life.
• 1:06:46
  And so there's no such thing as an unplanned child in that
• 1:06:50
  project of marriage. Is that a fairway to?
• 1:06:53
  Put it or I would say no, let's see.
• 1:06:55
  I think that's right. I think what you just said is
• 1:06:57
  correct, but I'd want to like maybe expand on a little bit.
• 1:07:01
  They all they all really struggled with the use of the
• 1:07:05
  word plan because it's really hard to like they all complained
• 1:07:09
  about, you know, the surveys you going to the doctor's.
• 1:07:11
  It was this child planned or unplanned?
• 1:07:12
  You're kind of like, well, it wasn't unplanned, but it wasn't
• 1:07:15
  planned exactly right. This is difficult because you
• 1:07:18
  may hope for a child, but it's different.
• 1:07:21
  Like you can't snap your fingers.
• 1:07:23
  Like drive to the airport. You, you are right.
• 1:07:25
  Exactly. I plan to go buy a dress.
• 1:07:26
  You can only be. Pick it out and I buy it.
• 1:07:29
  You can only be open to it. Can you do that for a child?
• 1:07:32
  No, You. Can't, that's right.
• 1:07:33
  So I, I would say that, but what they, they may have used birth
• 1:07:38
  control at some point or or contraception at some point.
• 1:07:41
  And we, we talked about that a little bit.
• 1:07:44
  Almost everybody did at some point in time, whether it was
• 1:07:46
  natural methods to space our children or some of them use IO
• 1:07:51
  DS to, to have time in between their babies.
• 1:07:55
  But the, I think the thought was kind of like the purpose of our
• 1:07:58
  marriage. This is why I kind of use this
• 1:07:59
  phrase as this, like the second part, the purpose of our
• 1:08:02
  marriage is to welcome children and sort of all things being
• 1:08:06
  equal, we would like another one.
• 1:08:08
  But of course, all things are not always equal, right?
• 1:08:10
  So just after you give birth, are you open to have a baby at
• 1:08:13
  that exact moment? Well, most people weren't open
• 1:08:16
  to having a baby at that exact moment.
• 1:08:18
  A couple of them were, but most of them described some
• 1:08:21
  intentional way of kind of making sure, trying to make sure
• 1:08:26
  that they avoided pregnancy for a little while after baby was
• 1:08:29
  born, which would seem like that makes sense how they did it.
• 1:08:33
  The logistics of it would be different across the women that
• 1:08:36
  I talked to for different reasons.
• 1:08:37
  And I tried to put that in there.
• 1:08:39
  And so the thought was like that you were, you were kind of you,
• 1:08:43
  you were living your marriage in a way that was open to God's
• 1:08:47
  Providence, but that you should discern when you're ready for
• 1:08:51
  the next child. So that, you know, if you did
• 1:08:53
  have to use contraception to space your children, that would
• 1:08:58
  be considered like a cross. So I just want to put like, I
• 1:09:01
  think the easiest way to describe it is just to kind of
• 1:09:03
  point out how weird that would be.
• 1:09:04
  Like in the modern, the modern language, you'd think, like, you
• 1:09:08
  know, I'm, I'm empowered by this at this moment.
• 1:09:10
  It would be more like, well, if we can't because I'm not healthy
• 1:09:13
  right now, or we really have to wait till dad's job gets better
• 1:09:16
  or we need, you know, something else.
• 1:09:18
  It's kind of a sorrow that we can't be, we can't welcome the
• 1:09:22
  next child where it's it's a cross to wait because all things
• 1:09:26
  equal, another child is, is pure gift.
• 1:09:29
  It's pure blessing. Like we were talking before
• 1:09:31
  would make us wealthier in this metaphysical sense.
• 1:09:34
  So that was, yeah, that was that was the challenge.
• 1:09:37
  Just trying to describe what it looks like to say that you've
• 1:09:39
  rejected contemporary approaches to planning your family while
• 1:09:44
  also saying you're not just mindlessly having children.
• 1:09:47
  So, and there's no language for that in our society.
• 1:09:50
  I think that language of openness is correct to think
• 1:09:53
  that's but but because it's so unusual, it's worth spending
• 1:09:57
  time describing. So it was, but I'm, I'm really
• 1:10:01
  here sitting here telling you that's how I thought about my
• 1:10:03
  marriage. And I knew that's how a few
• 1:10:06
  friends of mine thought about their marriages.
• 1:10:08
  But I did not know if that was common among women of other
• 1:10:11
  faiths or women of, you know, less faith or different types of
• 1:10:16
  faith. I didn't know if I'd hear that
• 1:10:19
  at all. So that was really, really
• 1:10:20
  surprising. That was for me, very
• 1:10:22
  surprising. Of course, that became an
• 1:10:23
  organizing theme of the book. It's kind of the big thing
• 1:10:26
  you're trying to say. Here's what here's what makes
• 1:10:28
  people different. The other tiny thing or, you
• 1:10:31
  know, smaller thing that becomes kind of a, it's something I
• 1:10:34
  included at the very end because it felt, it felt a shame not to
• 1:10:38
  include. It was this thing that we talked
• 1:10:40
  about the beginning, which was the experience that I had, where
• 1:10:43
  my first child was really a gift of healing to a grieving family.
• 1:10:49
  And I thought that was just us and God's Providence for us.
• 1:10:53
  But in one of the very first interviews, maybe 3 or 4
• 1:10:56
  interviews, and we heard a woman tell us about how her husband
• 1:11:00
  had been depressed and he lost his job and he lost his dad in a
• 1:11:04
  kind of real quick succession. And and then they kind of had a,
• 1:11:08
  you know, a moderately unexpected pregnancy.
• 1:11:12
  And he wasn't excited about it. He, he was like, we'll just stay
• 1:11:17
  bummed about it. He wasn't confident it would be
• 1:11:19
  OK. And she says something like, you
• 1:11:22
  know, I birthed that baby and I put her in his arms and he never
• 1:11:27
  put her down. And she said he just held that
• 1:11:29
  baby and he healed. And I was like kidding, all
• 1:11:34
  teary eyed listening to this because I thought, well, I've
• 1:11:36
  heard that story before. Because my grieving children who
• 1:11:40
  the ones who are in their, you know, early teens, like that's
• 1:11:43
  they were too conflicted for me to give them a hug.
• 1:11:46
  And I didn't know how I, I didn't have those resources yet.
• 1:11:49
  So I put this baby in their arms and they were like, oh, and they
• 1:11:53
  did just needed that love. Like the what is that?
• 1:11:56
  And so I heard it from from Kyra.
• 1:11:59
  So I tell her story, and it was enough.
• 1:12:02
  Like, if I'd heard it once, I was like, OK, wow, OK.
• 1:12:04
  It was like, all right, give me a minute.
• 1:12:06
  I'm not ready to finish this interview yet.
• 1:12:08
  And then another interview a few weeks later on the other side of
• 1:12:12
  the country. This lady's talking about how
• 1:12:15
  their sixth child was completely unexpected.
• 1:12:18
  And they were happy about it, but it was unexpected.
• 1:12:21
  And it was a a difficult moment they were in because their
• 1:12:25
  oldest child had been diagnosed with a very severe anxiety
• 1:12:28
  depression disorder. And they tried all kinds of
• 1:12:30
  things, therapists and medications and all these sorts
• 1:12:33
  of things. And then this baby was born and
• 1:12:35
  she was really struggling in her prayer, like, why God are you
• 1:12:37
  giving us this child now? Because we don't have his
• 1:12:41
  symptoms under control. And this seems really
• 1:12:43
  overwhelming. And it was the same story she
• 1:12:46
  said. We brought this baby home and my
• 1:12:48
  anxious, depressed, like, I don't know if he was 12 or
• 1:12:51
  something. He just held this baby and got
• 1:12:55
  better and I'm like, OK, if I hear this one more time, this is
• 1:12:59
  going to be a theme, right? No.
• 1:13:01
  And I just kept hearing this many, many times over.
• 1:13:06
  So I think it was about OK. I only interviewed 55 people.
• 1:13:08
  I was about 20% of that group, 10 or 10/11/12 times maybe I
• 1:13:13
  heard a specific example of that and this was surprising.
• 1:13:17
  Of course, I didn't expect to hear it, but I was also really,
• 1:13:20
  really stunned by it because I thought, well, this is if this
• 1:13:24
  is true, if, if 20% of my little sample, which is not
• 1:13:27
  representative, have stories like this, like how, how common
• 1:13:30
  is this? And is this known?
• 1:13:33
  Do people know that babies have the capacity to bring healing to
• 1:13:38
  anxious, troubled teenagers or grieving adult men?
• 1:13:43
  And I thought, well, wait a minute.
• 1:13:44
  Like, we're, we're really busy telling people that if they have
• 1:13:47
  a baby at a difficult time, they should definitely run out and
• 1:13:49
  abort that baby. And I thought, like, maybe we
• 1:13:54
  should, like, ask more questions about this, You know, so the way
• 1:13:56
  I put it in the book, like, this is a pretty awkward question to
• 1:13:59
  ask for a nation that's been busy aborting its babies.
• 1:14:02
  And now we have this mountain of like teenage anxiety disorder,
• 1:14:06
  like other people are researching this and trouble,
• 1:14:08
  you know, I'm sure smartphones are part of the problem and like
• 1:14:10
  on being online is part of the problem.
• 1:14:12
  And there's many things that are part of the problem.
• 1:14:15
  But our teenagers aren't living with babies.
• 1:14:17
  Our teenagers are not living with.
• 1:14:19
  Babies. They're not living with babies.
• 1:14:20
  Because they're one or two of them.
• 1:14:22
  There's two. There's not a big enough family
• 1:14:24
  for the parents to still be having kids and there's a baby
• 1:14:26
  in that. Correct.
• 1:14:27
  And nobody thinks about that? Wow.
• 1:14:30
  What a point, Catherine. So this was this like knocked
• 1:14:33
  me, knocked me off my feet. And you're referring to the
• 1:14:35
  decline in mental health for teens?
• 1:14:38
  Teens in particular, yeah. Wow.
• 1:14:41
  Combined with the decline in birth rate.
• 1:14:43
  It's like boom. They don't have siblings.
• 1:14:45
  They don't have siblings. They don't.
• 1:14:46
  Have little siblings and so many of the women talked about how.
• 1:14:49
  That's such a powerful point. I know.
• 1:14:51
  I mean, I think about my life and I had mental health issues
• 1:14:54
  as a teen in part because of the use of media.
• 1:14:58
  I mean, I it was like the early Tumblr, like Myspace, this is
• 1:15:02
  the blog. But anyways, like, you know,
• 1:15:03
  eating disorder stuff, I had issues and there's other things
• 1:15:06
  in the family I I wrote about in my book.
• 1:15:07
  But one thing I mentioned the book was having this cause was
• 1:15:11
  very helpful to me. But connected to that cause was
• 1:15:14
  the little children in my home, which were part of the cause,
• 1:15:16
  like the baby and how beautiful is the baby and the, and the
• 1:15:19
  whole thing of the baby. And yeah, I mean, babies are so
• 1:15:22
  healing. They are, they're so healing and
• 1:15:24
  they're so orienting. It's like what's life about?
• 1:15:26
  You hear the cry and it's like, this is life's about this.
• 1:15:29
  And it's so beautiful. And I was, I was feeding my
• 1:15:32
  daughter yesterday and I was just marveling at how happy I
• 1:15:37
  Valentine. It's just like, I'm so happy.
• 1:15:39
  Like not that it's easy, not that there.
• 1:15:41
  And again, I there's everyone's stories different, but so much.
• 1:15:44
  I mean, there's physical oxytocin, you know, flowing
• 1:15:47
  through my veins right now holding this little 1.
• 1:15:50
  And that's God's design, and it's such a blessing.
• 1:15:52
  It's such a blessing. Yeah, yeah.
• 1:15:55
  For me, this was, I put this, I put this in a chapter called
• 1:15:59
  Saving Our Lives. And I heard it so many times.
• 1:16:01
  I thought this has to be like the next book.
• 1:16:03
  I mean, this has to be like a topic.
• 1:16:05
  I mean, there should be whole teams of researchers out trying
• 1:16:07
  to figure this out. It's I don't know anybody who
• 1:16:12
  talks about this. So to me, that was like, for
• 1:16:14
  sure, it was up there. It was like a big, big.
• 1:16:16
  So this wasn't the reason for my, you know, my study I was
• 1:16:18
  after kind of why would people have kids and stuff.
• 1:16:21
  But for some small group of the people that I talked to, like
• 1:16:24
  Kyra, the reason she went on to have more children after that is
• 1:16:27
  because her husband then said babies are never the problem.
• 1:16:31
  It's OK, yeah, we can have another baby.
• 1:16:35
  And so for for some, some group of them, that was why they went
• 1:16:38
  on to have more children. They had seen like, why would
• 1:16:41
  we? Why would we?
• 1:16:42
  Why would we stop this? Like, why would we say no to the
• 1:16:44
  next child? So, yeah.
• 1:16:47
  So I probably more we could say and theorize about that.
• 1:16:50
  I think what it means for a teenager who's got all kinds of
• 1:16:54
  anxiety or just, you know, insecurities.
• 1:16:57
  My, I've got teenage sons that are one of whom thinks he should
• 1:17:01
  weigh more and be more physically fit, you know, more
• 1:17:04
  buff. He's sort of trying to build up
• 1:17:05
  his little scrawny muscles, you know, But the point is he's, he
• 1:17:08
  lacks confidence and he's in the process of becoming a man.
• 1:17:12
  But his younger brother, who's 8, you know, really thinks he's
• 1:17:15
  a, he's a big man, you know, and I think that's got a, that's got
• 1:17:19
  to count for something. He thinks his older brother is a
• 1:17:21
  big man. Yeah.
• 1:17:22
  Because he is, he's a big man. Yeah.
• 1:17:24
  And he's like he he's, you know, kind of a here a good point.
• 1:17:27
  Yeah. So I'd like to research this
• 1:17:29
  more, but I really like to get that message out too more.
• 1:17:34
  I would be willing to bet that if we if we work to find more of
• 1:17:37
  those stories, that those stories need to be told.
• 1:17:40
  Thank you for telling these stories that need to be told.
• 1:17:43
  Where can people find Hannah's children?
• 1:17:45
  Well, they can find up on Amazon, and I want to encourage
• 1:17:48
  people who aren't readers or who find the size of that book a
• 1:17:51
  little intimidating. The Audible version is also of
• 1:17:54
  course on Amazon and is right and easy to listen to.
• 1:17:58
  And I didn't ask you this at the beginning, but this is the last
• 1:18:00
  question I promised. I gotta let you go right now.
• 1:18:02
  Yeah. Who's Hannah?
• 1:18:03
  Oh, Hannah. Hannah is the.
• 1:18:04
  She's the. It's all.
• 1:18:06
  The women in the book have pseudonyms, but Hannah's the
• 1:18:09
  name I gave to the first woman you meet in the book who I never
• 1:18:13
  thought she would have children and had this amazing religious
• 1:18:15
  conversion and then went on to get married and have seven
• 1:18:18
  children. And she's really funny and you
• 1:18:20
  want to read about her story. It's really great.
• 1:18:23
  But Hannah, of course, is also the biblical Hannah, who was
• 1:18:27
  barren and prayed for children, and God said God sent her
• 1:18:30
  Samuel. We know about Samuel for this
• 1:18:33
  child. I prayed, but what I didn't know
• 1:18:35
  until I went back and studied the story of Hannah and Hannah's
• 1:18:39
  the name Hannah means blessed by God with a child.
• 1:18:42
  And when I went back and reread the story of Hannah in
• 1:18:45
  preparation for writing this book, I was working on it.
• 1:18:48
  I was stunned to find out that when she brings Samuel back to
• 1:18:52
  God, so she prays for the baby. She says, God, if you give me
• 1:18:55
  this baby, I'll bring him back to you to live in your service.
• 1:18:58
  And so she brings her beloved Samuel back to the temple.
• 1:19:02
  And the priests say that is so much faith like that.
• 1:19:05
  What a great gift she's brought her most valuable possession and
• 1:19:10
  the priestess to God. We should reward this woman for
• 1:19:12
  her faith. And she has five more children.
• 1:19:15
  So those are Hannah's children. So really this idea of being
• 1:19:18
  blessed and which really was the the resounding message.
• 1:19:22
  So I wanted to invoke the biblical Hannah and also just to
• 1:19:25
  make it to say it out loud that although I studied women with
• 1:19:31
  many children, nobody's better because they have more because
• 1:19:33
  these are blessings, right? So this is not something that
• 1:19:36
  makes us better, more meritorious.
• 1:19:38
  And so, as you might imagine, my publisher wanted to kind of
• 1:19:43
  title this book with something a little bit more, you know, have
• 1:19:46
  more children sort of thing, or be, you know, choose more, a
• 1:19:51
  worse title, Super Moms. And I thought, no, no, no,
• 1:19:53
  actually, this is a story of women who feel very humbled and
• 1:19:56
  very not worthy to receive their blessings.
• 1:20:00
  And so this is not a story of, of being better by having more,
• 1:20:05
  but by being, I would say, yeah, humbled by the by the presence
• 1:20:09
  of the Almighty and the way that he works miracles in our lives.
• 1:20:12
  And so I think that in the person of Hannah, we can find
• 1:20:16
  both the the barren woman who couldn't have children and the
• 1:20:19
  woman who sort of blessed beyond measure.
• 1:20:22
  In this single person, which I think hopefully we can find, you
• 1:20:26
  know, all of us who blessed with few or many whatever are stayed
• 1:20:29
  in lives that we can find in in that scriptural person of
• 1:20:33
  Hannah, a kind of a kind of solidarity because we're what
• 1:20:38
  we're united by is this like sense of the presence of the
• 1:20:42
  Almighty in our lives. So I really wanted to strive to
• 1:20:45
  find a way to talk about this in a way that wouldn't make any
• 1:20:48
  woman feel less, but we could celebrate the the gift of God's,
• 1:20:53
  God's blessings in our lives. You did it beautifully.
• 1:20:55
  Thank you so much, Catherine. Thanks for joining the podcast.
• 1:20:58
  Absolutely. It was so much fun.
• 1:21:00
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• 1:21:07
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• 1:21:10
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