The Fertility Gap: The Need For A Pro-Family Agenda

So God created man in His own image, in the image of God created He him; male and female created He them. And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth (Genesis 1: 27–28).

Human fertility has been in a downward spiral among the once-civilized, once-Christian nations. Families have shrunken dramatically; in consequence of the rising rejection of marriage, they have begun to disappear altogether. In some locales, such as West Germany, Denmark, and even Italy, average fertility is moving toward only one child per couple, a crude formula for extinction. Some evidence suggests that the decay in fertility must be understood as a consequence of a new dissonance in the world, where our culture, our economy, and our mode of government have become — in an altogether new way — hostile to family and fertility. Our understanding of Western man’s fertility failure must take into account, I believe, this new dissonance in our lives. I will suggest that where once the “normal” man and woman could, with relative ease, abide by the will of God in matters of fertility, only the “heroic,” and hence the unusual, man and woman can do so today.1

My approach is to answer three questions: Is actual fertility below desired fertility? If so, why? And what are the implications for future action? My answers to these questions will be constructed largely on the findings of social science, in the belief that honest investigations of human activity ought to reveal insights that are in consonance with the truths of human nature.

Looking at the Western world, then, can we say that actual fertility is below desired fertility? Is there a “fertility gap”? While the problems of accurately measuring “desired fertility” are considerable,2 “the answer appears to be “yes.” One recent assessment of American data showed that never-married women tended to expect more births, once married, than they subsequently had.3 Looking specifically at Catholic Americans, demographer William Mosher found that while Catholic women, prior to marriage, tended to expect significantly more children than non-Catholics, the difference disappeared as expected births were compared after marriage.4 For some ethnic populations, the fertility gap is considerable. Among Mexican-American women, for example, 44 percent wanted more children in 1973, but only 29 percent actually had them five years later.5

In Europe, the fertility gap may be larger. A study of 4,000 Norwegian women found that of those saying, in 1977, that they wanted another child within five years, only 55 percent actually had one by 1932. Among women ages 30–34, a mere 43 percent of those planning a child actually fulfilled their plan.6 Another research team, assessing the desire for children among West German couples, found that while newlyweds desired an average of two children, they subsequently shifted the desired number to only one child.7

Why does this fertility gap exist?

The answers may lie in a better understanding of the overall causes of the fertility decline.

From the 1930s until recently, analysts understood the decline in fertility as one component of what they called the demographic transition. Seen as the population component of modernization, the demographic transition accompanied the rise of industry and great cities and other social changes that marked the end of the old world and the emergence of the new. The process — it was said — took tradition-bound, agricultural societies marked by a balance between high death rates and high fertility and transformed them into urban, industrial societies now balancing low mortality and low fertility. The seemingly natural balance at either end of the change contrasted with the imbalance of the transition period, where mortality reduction preceded fertility reduction and produced, for a time, rapid population growth.

This mechanistic, neo-Malthusian interpretation accorded fairly well with population developments in Europe and America between 1800 and 1940. While at one level merely descriptive, the concept of the demographic transition did carry with it a sense of inevitability or determinism that implied historical causation.

Yet experiences after 1940 began to suggest the need for a more complex theory of fertility decline. In the West, the “baby boom” of the 1950s mystified demographers, particularly the real increase in completed family size seen in the United States, Canada, and Australia.8 Similarly inexplicable was the turn by the same Western societies to sub-replacement fertility after 1970, and the growing instability of demographic projections of any sort.9 Religious and ethnic groups in the United States also exhibited odd departures from expected behavior in this period. Moreover, developments in the non-Western world began to cast doubt on the universal value of the existing model.

A vast quantity of new research on the causes of fertility decline has appeared in recent years, work that has both illuminated and obscured the subject through its sheer mass. Analyses of gender roles have shown, perhaps unsurprisingly, that a traditional gender role orientation among women results in higher fertility, while egalitarian attitudes among women are associated with fewer births.10 Numerous studies also reveal a strong, regular relationship between the employment of married women and reduced fertility.11 The evidence is strong, too, that an increase in the real wages of men will raise fertility, while an increase in the real wages of women will delay child bearing and reduce the number of children.12

Studies of intentional childlessness, a growing factor in declining fertility, show that its practitioners view parenthood as daunting, expensive, and involving loss of control in their lives, while they see the absence of children as preserving marital harmony and a comfortable routine. However, independent studies also suggest childlessness actually derives from psychological roots: the childless tend to be distanced emotionally from their parents, while intentionally childless men tend to grow up without fathers, and are left with a deep fear of entering into permanent commitments.13

Some forms of government intervention are also indicted by the research. Detailed studies of the impact of Social Security on fertility “consistently support the conclusion that increases in current Social Security benefits decrease fertility in the United States,” since social insurance undercuts the economic value of children. Looking at an international sample, Charles Hohm of San Diego State University found that the reverse relationship also proved true: a lower fertility rate is causally related to higher Social Security benefits. So from Austria to Zambia, it appears that higher old age benefits cause fewer babies, and fewer babies cause higher benefits, with no apparent stopping point.14

Ann Marie Sorenson, of the University of Arizona, has documented how pro-natalist values wither under the impact of assimilation into a new culture. Among Mexican-Americans, she shows that high fertility is a function of continued identification with Mexico: with other factors (including income and fathers’ occupations) held constant, Mexican-American homes in which English is spoken average 2.3 children; but in those where Spanish is dominant, 2.9 children.15

Effect of political opponents of fertility

While direct studies are curiously non-existent, indirect evidence also suggests that fertility reduction came in part through the direct actions of the political opponents of fertility, specifically their efforts to increase the number of sterile adults in America. In an influential 1958 article, Richard Meier urged the movement of women into jobs that would make a stable home and community life impossible: tasks such as engineering, sales, fire fighting, and management. Such a movement began, of course, in the 1960s, stimulated by many arguments, including the Malthusian complaint. Eight years later, Edward Pohlman argued that “the population avalanche may be used to justify…large-scale attempts to manipulate family size desire, even rather stealthily.” A cultural redefinition of a family with three or more children as “selfish” and “immoral” would be particularly useful, he said: a goal largely achieved by the early 1970s and reflected in the 1972 Report of the President’s Commission on Population Growth and the American Future. More recently, David Yaukey of the University of Massachusetts explained that policy makers must seek to alter marital patterns in order to reduce the motivation for having children. Along with welfare measures that would encourage divorce and discourage remarriage, he called for strategies to increase the death rate of husbands. He acknowledged that the tactic of directly raising the male death rate “would seldom be a permissible policy.” However, Yaukey did conclude that “greater emphasis could be placed on reducing female mortality than male mortality,” and so “maximize the proportion of women who were widowed.” We have yet to see how well this new strategy works among us fellows.16

The most surprising evidence has come from research into the effects of education on fertility. U.S. data from the mid-1970s World Fertility Survey showed that the number of children expected by married women was nearly a perfect negative function of their level of education: the more years of schooling they had, the fewer desired children.17 Demographers David Bloom and James Trussell found the level of education to be an important determinant of both delayed child bearing and permanent childlessness, a linkage “reaching strikingly high levels” in recent years among women continuing their education beyond high school.18

Among Catholics, too, education is significantly related to fertility decline. Canadian demographers report that the sharp decline in the fertility of Quebec Catholics during the 1960s was linked to a prior shift in style of education, from a traditionally classical approach to one oriented to modern professions.19

This vast catalogue of possible causes of fertility decline — ranging from gender roles and the employment of mothers to Social Security and education — has generally affirmed what common sense tells us. Yet here, as elsewhere, the specialized nature of research and the array of explanations seem to leave us with no simple answers or real policy alternatives.

An integrated theory of fertility decline

In this decade, however, several social scientists have sought to build a new, integrated theory of fertility decline, drawing together the many answers toward one. The studies of John C. Caldwell and Norman Ryder provide, in particular, illuminating new angles to our question. Significantly, they both emphasize the dominant role of mass or state education, and the ideology driving it, as the cause of fertility decline.

I should note at the outset that both Caldwell and Ryder operate within a neo-Malthusian perspective. They see excessive fertility as the primary human population problem, and generally seek to understand fertility change in order to reduce the growth in human numbers. Their work also reflects the best thinking from a serious discipline, and it deserves our attention.

John Caldwell’s Theory of Fertility Decline appeared in 1982, and represents an attempt to apply the results of anthropological research, primarily in Africa and Australia, across the board. Caldwell asserts that fertility declines only when there is a change in economic relations within the family. In traditional societies with a “familial mode of production,” the flow of wealth is from children to parents. Children are thus perceived as economic assets, and fertility is high. However, as the modern “labor market mode of production,” breaks through in a society, the flow of wealth reverses, now going from parents to children. Educated children, Caldwell explains, expect to be given more and to be demanded of less by their parents, and their economic importance for parents evaporates.

In an important turn of his argument, Caldwell emphasizes that it is not urbanization or the rise of industry that causes this change in family relations. Rather, it is the prior development, importation, or promulgation of new, individualist ideas through mass education that causes the critical shift in the parent-child relationship. Mass schooling, particularly the modernist phenomenon of state-mandated education, serves as the driving force behind the shift in preference from a large to a small family and the construction of the modern family as limited and egalitarian, with its members participating in economic activity only outside the family.20

Evidence from the United States gives strong support to Caldwell’s emphasis on the changing roles of children as the primary explanation of fertility decline. The fall in American fertility between 1850 and 1900 has long puzzled demographers, for throughout that period the U.S. remained predominantly rural and absorbed masses of young immigrants, situations normally associated with high fertility. Caldwell ’s interpreters speculated though, that the leadership role of the United States in introducing a mass state education system might explain the change. And indeed, U.S. data from 1871 to 1900 show a remarkably strong negative relationship between the estimated fertility of white women and an index of public school growth developed by L.P. Ayres in 1920.

Fertility decline was particularly related to the average number of days that children attended school in a year, the percentage of children who attended school during the year, and the percentage of enrolled students in public high schools. Even among rural farming families, the negative influence of public schooling on fertility was strong. In the late 19th century, each additional month that a child spent in school decreased family size by .23 children: that is, a child with nine months in school would come from a family averaging 5.3 children, a child with no schooling at all from one averaging 7.4 children. Moreover, the early U.S. fertility decline was concentrated in the Northeast, the section of the country also sporting the earliest development of a comprehensive public education system.21

With his usual bluntness, Norman Ryder, Professor of Sociology at Princeton and Director of the University’s famed Office of Population Research, has offered a variation of the Caldwell Theory, one giving greater emphasis to “mortality decline” as a mechanism forcing change in family structure. Yet his theory also continues to reveal the role of state education and state power as a destroyer of family integrity.

Writing recently for the Population Bulletin of the United Nations, Ryder emphasizes that any viable social system must have regularized arrangements by which productive adults are committed to the care of young and old dependents. Family continuity over time rests on the crafting of an intergenerational contract, where productive adults share resources with their own elderly parents, in the hope of receiving similar, future support from their own children. This broad human household, rooted in nature, is authoritarian, patriarchal, and oriented to the common good of the family over time. Its success, as that of any social organism, rests on its ability to resist deviance and pass on its web of obligations to future generations. Family stability is most easily achieved, Ryder asserts, in a rural society based on subsistence agriculture.

The breakthrough of the modern world upsets this equilibrium, particularly the intergeneration contract. Simple improvements in public health that reduce the death rate, for example, may delay the time when the younger generation might succeed the older, or may increase the number of surviving sons clamoring for their father’s estate. Migration and delayed marriage might restore equilibrium for a time, but at the cost of family dispersion. Meanwhile, specialized new institutions emerge that compete with the family, performing functions in a more efficient manner than kin groups are capable of doing. Industry, for example, enhances productivity by exploiting the division of labor, as employers make contracts with individuals “emphasizing initiative and self-reliance, themes contradictory to the way the family works.” Mobility and individualism also undermine the unity of the family.

Mass education, Ryder continues, further threatens family life. It serves as modern society’s agent in the release of the individual from obligations to kin. “Education of the junior generation is a subversive influence. Boys who go to school distinguish between what they learn there and what their father can teach them .… The reinforcement of the [family] control structure is undermined when the young are trained outside the family for specialized roles in which the father has no competence.”

A related struggle goes on between the family and the state for the allegiance of the individual. As Ryder puts it: “[Modern] society has interest in the rational allocation of human resources to serve aggregate economic and political ends, and expresses those interests by substituting individualistic for familistic principles in role assignment. Political organizations, like economic organizations, demand loyalty and attempt to neutralize family particularism. There is a struggle between the family and the State for the minds of the young.” In this struggle, he continues, the school serves as “the chief instrument for teaching citizenship, in a direct appeal to the children over the heads of the parents.” The school also serves as the medium for communicating “state morality” and a state mythology designed to supplant those of families.

At the same time, Ryder goes on, the state creates a social security system that replaces the economic bonds between generations of a family with a redistribution system that leaves the state as the new locus of economic loyalty. Bans on child labor also reduce the potential economic value of children, while extended, compulsory education dramatically raises their cost. State welfare authorities assume ever more control over child rearing, be it as a service said to “help families” or in the name of preventing “neglect” and “abuse.” For a time, the family may reorganize around the nuclear unit of procreation, severing most bonds with the extended family, yet maintaining a division of labor by gender and a residual patriarchal authority. Yet this structure, Ryder suggests, seems to give way, in turn, to a much more different, more compatible form, resting on egalitarian gender roles and a pure commitment to the individual. In either structure, though, fertility is progressively diminished, and the individual is left alone and unprotected in a dependent relationship with the state.22

Implications for the defenders of fertility

With their secular frame of reference, the Caldwell and Ryder explanations of fertility decline are, I believe, essentially on target, and they hold important implications for the defenders of fertility.

First, there is Caldwell’s important conclusion that fertility decline is not a necessary part of the emergence of industrial society. Rather, the decline of fertility begins for independent reasons, rooted in ideas or ideology, and the method of education which a society employs to spread these ideas.

Second, spiritual exertion can defend human fertility for a time, but natural fertility cannot indefinitely be sustained in the face of a hostile culture and State.

There are several recent examples of religious communities defying the times. The 1945–67 era, for example, produced an extraordinary flowering of Catholic fertility in America. While births rose for all American religious groups during this period, it rose far more rapidly and continued longer among Catholics, suggesting that the celebrated “baby boom” was in truth largely a Catholic phenomenon. Indeed, the turn to larger families was found exclusively among Catholics. In the early 1950s, only 10 percent of Catholics under age 40 reported having four or more children, a figure close to the 9 percent for Protestants. By 1959, the Protestant figure was unchanged, but the proportion of Catholics with large families had more than doubled to 21 percent.

It appears that this resurgence in Catholic fertility derived, in part, from a consistent, vocal celebration of the large Catholic family throughout the Church’s leadership, from Pope Pius XII to the American bishops to parish priests. Most surprisingly, this development flourished among the best-educated Catholics: Catholic women who had attended college were bearing significantly more children than those Catholics without a high school degree. Through the mid-1960s, moreover, each new group of young, college-educated Catholic parents was more pro-natalist in its attitudes than the group before. And their actions had a clear religious focus: more frequent attendance at Mass was tied to more births.23

Yet in the 1968–1975 period, this religiously-driven affirmation of Catholic fertility collapsed. By the latter date, Protestant fertility was higher than that of Catholics. Moreover, the large family ideal vanished. One survey found that in 1967, 27 percent of “devout Catholics” wanted five or more children; by 1971 — a mere four years later — only 7 percent did. The fall in expected fertility was sharpest among the better educated, while frequency of attendance at Mass also disappeared as a factor predicting fertility.24

This return of American Catholics to normal modern behavior has usually been attributed to the current of ideas affecting Catholicism in the mid and late 1960s, particularly the encouragement of debate on the birth control question in the mid-1960s, followed by the stunning reaffirmation of orthodoxy in Humanae Vitae. This is no doubt true. My point, though, is that the resurgence of Catholic fertility after World War II occurred in defiance of modernity: it might be characterized as a spirit-driven protest against the emerging post-family world, and the tension with the world could be sustained only so long as doctrinal certainty was absolute. While extraordinary, the Catholic baby boom proved unable to survive the first serious internal crisis of authority: social, economic, and cultural currents swept this act of mass heroism aside.

Starting in the 1970s, American Mormons began displaying a very similar defiance of the times. While the U.S. fertility rate continued to decline sharply in this decade, Utah’s fertility climbed by six percent to a level twice that of the national rate. The change appears to be related to the upsurge in temple construction and mission work that marked the denomination in this period. Indeed, as with the earlier Catholic episode, Mormon fertility is now positively related to frequency of attendance at services, and to the observance of daily worship activities within the family. Moreover, high Mormon fertility is also tied to education: college-educated Mormons have more children than those with only a high school degree.25 Whether this surge in fertility, and group defiance of the age, can withstand a future internal crisis must, of course, remain speculation.

Yet it does seem evident that a sustained opposition to the anti-family pressures of the modern world is difficult. Scattered marginal groups, such as the Amish and the Hutterites, have managed to achieve it for a century or more, but even they now seem to be succumbing to the “trend of the times,” and their average family size is shrinking. For a large human community to be in harmony with the will of God, it appears that the social and economic order must also be in harmony with the purposes and structure of the natural family.

The third lesson drawn from recent demographic theory is that the modern state cannot be relied on to save the family. Most family policy agendas involve new governmental “supports” for families: state-funded health care, state-sponsored child care, and so on. But, as Ryder so ably explains, the state is not a benign partner for families. Rather, in the broad sweep of history, it is the principal rival of the family in a struggle for the loyalty of individuals. A state-family partnership is the rough equivalent of a wolf-rabbit alliance. Virtually all programs of the modern liberal state, at some level, work to subvert the family. The challenge is seldom direct. Usually, it comes through the benign offering of a more efficient or less-demanding “alternative” to a product or service provided by the family.

The fourth lesson is that a proper pro-family agenda should aim at restoring, to the degree possible, the natural family economy, and the natural relationship of men to women, parents to children, and ancestors to posterity. The task may be less daunting than it sounds. Possible actions toward this goal extend from the public policy arena to activities at home, and include:

First: Targeted income and payroll tax relief, keyed to the number and age of dependent children, and designed to allow families to keep more of their earned income and simultaneously reduce the resources available to government;

Second: Alternatives to state old-age pensions, particularly reforms that would gradually restore incentives to inter-generational support and care within families;

Third: The dismantling of those state agencies designed to police parents and families (often with pernicious results);

Fourth: The encouragement of what economists call “home production,” or economic functions in the home. These range from such traditional tasks as the care of our own children, meal preparation, gardening, and canning to the production of handicrafts and even Toffler’s “electronic cottage”;

Fifth: Family-centered education, be it either through the rapidly growing home-schooling movement, or through religious schools truly committed in their curricula to a support of families and defiance of the times.

My essential point is that actual fertility will again equal desired fertility, and fertility itself will again be natural at a society-wide level, only as the family is restored to an economic and social function that is in harmony with the world.

If I am correct here, then a particular dilemma of sorts faces the Catholic Church, for a dominant element of its social teaching since Rerum Novarum has been to make its peace with the modern liberal state. With the notable exception of its spirited defense of parochial education, the Catholic Church, much like many Protestant counterparts, has regularly urged the expansion of state welfare and state benefits. These are justified in the name of compassion or justice; yet the unintended effects of state growth may have been to substitute state power for family power, and so weaken the material basis for conjugal life and fertility.

In its urgent warning about the extraordinary dangers of public authorities using the practice of contraception for their own ends, the Catholic encyclical letter of Pope Paul VI, Humanae Vitae, leaps back in time and draws on the spirit, if not the specific protests, of the last Pontiff to stand fully athwart the engine of progressive change, shouting “halt.” Pius IX, in a passage eerily resembling the descriptions of Caldwell and Ryder, explains how certain men, misguided servants of the modern state, “declare that domestic society or the family derives all its reason of existence solely from the Civil Law; and consequently all the rights of parents over their children emanate from and depend upon the Civil Law — especially the right of instruction and education.” In protesting this belief, Pius stressed how the modern state undermined Christian life by corrupting the minds of youth and separating them from their families. In our era of school-based sex clinics, government-funded abortions, and welfare mothers — without husbands — wedded to the state, this warning from 125 years ago is prophetic. And it is that same spirit of protest — lodged in the hearts of men and women and in the churches that must shelter them from the schemes of princes and bureaucrats — that our age so urgently needs.

Allan C. Carlson, Ph.D., is the president of the Rockford Institute, Rockford, Ill; he served as Assistant Director of the Governmental Affairs Office of the Lutheran Council, U.S.A. Among his other activities, Dr. Carlson has written extensively on modern social history and social policy; testified as an expert witness before significant government panels; prepared commissioned research papers for the Institute of Medicine, the National Academy of Sciences and the U.S. Department of Education; and served as consultant for the U.S. Departments of Justice and Health and Human Services.

An earlier version of this article appeared in the journal, This World, vol. 26, Summer 1989.