Three: 'As many as God will give us.'
SILVER SPRING, MD—I am back home from my trip to Utah and Idaho. I wrote about my conversations in Salt Lake City in newsletters One and Two. I also wrote about Utah’s Baby Bust.
Yes, Utah’s Total Fertility Rate is below 2 babies per woman of childbearing age. That means the adults of Utah are not replacing themselves.
One cause is the changing composition: Utah is a great place to live, so people are moving there, and so the state’s population is less Latter-Day Saints, percentage-wise, than it used to be.
A second cause is that LDS women are having fewer babies. Four kids is the new seven, one mom and school teacher told me in Farmington. Speaking of Farmington, I had a great encounter there, with three homeschooling Moms, which I recounted a bit in that Examiner piece.
My “People I Met” section, though, will focus on my encounters outside of Utah.
I drove up to Rexburg, Idaho, because it is the most babyful place in America. Madison County in the year ending June 30, 2020, had the most babies per capita.
People I Met: Mormons married by graduation
Rexburg is home to BYU Idaho. At the Red Rabbit, a restaurant in town, the waitress told me the school’s nickname: “BYU I Do.”
College Ave has a bridal shop about two blocks from a campus and a couple of doors down is a baby clothing store. Then where College Ave. hits Main Street is a diamond shop that specializes in selling engagement rings to the college guys who have returned from their mission.
One of the first women I met on campus was a professor named Noelle. She just graduated, and her husband, a Korean immigrant, is still an undergraduate. She told me they want to have kids once he graduates probably. And then she wants to be home. Him staying at home for some stretch also in the cards.
I think it's important for parents to be in the home when children are there. I grew up in a home where my mom was there. We were thankfully in an economic situation where my dad could support us. I know that's not always the case.
That's why I think getting an education is so important. Because I know if I needed to, I could help support my family. Eventually I'd like to do grad school, and eventually I'd like to do grad school… If ever I needed my husband could stay at home with the kids or we could work that out.
But I do want to be a mom and if possible, I want to make sure I'm in the home when my children are, because that can build irreplaceable relationships….
She told me that her mom sacrificing a career, and her dad working hard to support an entire family, “made me take schooling more seriously. I think it made me value relationships in my life more seriously. Because I saw it kind of as a sacrifice on both ends. My dad was working, he was providing for us. But my mom was also working in providing for us, just in a non economic way.”
Stuff I read: Preferences, Intentions, and Reality in family size
“Here’s the answer,” Washington Post columnist Petula Dvorak writes to explain the baby bust: “choices. For the first time in human history, women truly have them. A lot of women don’t feel pressured to have kids they don’t want.”
This is the standard argument to explain the Baby Bust. In effect, it’s that women never really wanted to have a bunch of kids, but the lack of choices and opportunity forced them into it. Nowadays, the story goes, contraception gives women the ability to control their body, and greater social equality gives women the ability to make their own money without needing to rely on men.
The argument here is that motherhood kinda sucks, and so women only did it when they lacked other choices—like eating the cafeteria meat loaf at lunch.
Melissa Kearney and other scholars tried to hash out the Baby Bust of the past decade, and they conclude that it’s due to “the ‘shifting priorities’ of more recent cohorts [of women], reflecting changes in preferences for having children, aspirations for life, and parenting norms….”
The authors wrote: “We suspect that this shift reflects broad societal changes that are hard to measure or quantify: possibilities include changing preferences for children, broader career options (and other aspirations) for women, and shifts in the nature of parenting.”
My colleague Lyman Stone rejects this conclusion, in a long Twitter thread.
![Twitter avatar for @lymanstoneky](https://substackcdn.com/image/twitter_name/w_96/lymanstoneky.jpg)
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His argument is that what Kearney et alia call “changing preferences” isn’t really changing preferences. Maybe it’s changing intentions, thanks to circumstances.
For instance, the number of women wanting 0 babies hasn’t really grown.
![Twitter avatar for @lymanstoneky](https://substackcdn.com/image/twitter_name/w_96/lymanstoneky.jpg)
![Image](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_600,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fpbs.substack.com%2Fmedia%2FFASwuJrVEAA0pzj.png)
High-schoolers, when asked, have consistently said, on average, about 2.5 kids, WAY above what they end up having.
![Twitter avatar for @lymanstoneky](https://substackcdn.com/image/twitter_name/w_96/lymanstoneky.jpg)
![Image](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_600,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fpbs.substack.com%2Fmedia%2FFAS4004XMAQ4I_P.png)
And here’s the key: Birthrates are falling not because women are simply desiring fewer babies and fewer women are desiring babies. Birthrates are falling, in significant part, because marriage is falling.
![Twitter avatar for @lymanstoneky](https://substackcdn.com/image/twitter_name/w_96/lymanstoneky.jpg)
Parenting: ‘As many as God will give us’
One of the people I spoke with in Idaho or Utah said that the right answer to how many kids you want is “as many as God will give us.”
The funny thing is that this a much more Catholic line than Mormon line. The LDS church has no proscription on artificial contraception in the way the Catholic Church does.
The “it’s all in God’s hands,” attitude is more Catholic while “God wants us to have a bunch of babies,” is more LDS.
My wife and I have, for more than a decade answered “as many as God will give us.” Sometimes this is a slightly combative response if we feel the question implies, “Good God, when the hell are you gonna stop breeding?”
Typically, though, when I give this answer, it’s rooted in my aversion to the very idea of family planning.
Children are a gift. Even if you’re feeling overwhelmed by gifts, it feels a bit ungrateful to declare that you simply won’t accept any more.