Chapter One

“He Still Wants You”—Stranger on a Train

“Besides wanting and choosing and being moved to do

this or that, men may also want to have (or not to have)
certain desires and motives. They are capable of wanting
to be different in their preferences and purposes. . . .”

—Harry G. Frankfurt, “Freedom of the Will and the

Concept of a Person,” 1971

R
eturning home from a trip, backpack at my feet, I settled into
a seat along the side of a Virginia Railway commuter train
from D.C. to Manassas with my infant son snuggled at my
chest. It was the spring of 2010, after I defended my dissertation but
before I graduated in June of that year. He was three months old,
downy-soft head peeking out from a front wrap. I had never ridden
that train before, and I have never ridden it since. I was surrounded
by working professionals headed home for the night, and the pas-
sengers noted my baby with surprise. A middle-aged woman asked,
“Is he your first?” I have no idea why this is such a common question

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to ask a mother with an infant, but over the years I spent traveling
with babies it was easily the most common icebreaker. The question
poses a dilemma for those of us with lots of children. Like the canned
“How’re you doing?” to which no one ever expects a negative
response, “Is it your first?” is supposed to be answered with a “Yeah,”
and then followed up with some kind of rejoinder along the lines of
“Enjoy it while it lasts,” or “Don’t worry, eventually he’ll sleep.”
What no one expects, not anywhere and least of all on a rush-hour
train, is “He’s my sixth!” At that answer, there was murmuring among
the train riders. But above the din I heard one response that I never
expected. The woman who had questioned me gave a swift, plaintive
reply: “Six! I guess your husband still wants you.” She was right, of
course. He did, and he still does—we’ve since had two more children,
eight altogether. But I had never considered his desire for me as
causal in relation to our family size—even though, in some sense, it
clearly is. Nor had I ever wondered whether having a lot of babies
might make us love each other more. I still don’t know. But no other
response to my family in public has struck me with the same tragic
force as that one fourteen years ago.
In a two-child world, an eight-child choice begs for an explana-
tion. What I chose is unusual, rare, maybe a little crazy. But I certainly
didn’t choose it for those reasons. I like to be on trend. I always know
where denim is going, and I spend more on shoes than I should. Why
not be on trend with my number of kids? Why have all these chil-
dren? I had every door open in front of me. Why this choice and not
another? I get asked this question a lot, and it turns out that other
women with big families get asked too.
I know what the answer isn’t. It’s not because I don’t believe in
using artificial birth control—even though I don’t. I know when every
one of my kids was conceived, and we could have avoided any one
of them. Natural family planning has its problems, but so do IUDs,

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 “He Still Wants You”—Stranger on a Train 5

condoms, and pills. Knowing how to avoid getting pregnant is easier

than most things I do. Besides old-fashioned wisdom, there are apps
to track fertility, wearable wristbands, and simple at-home fertility
tests with red lights and green lights. None of my kids was an accident
or unplanned in any strict sense. We always said, “Let’s go—we’re
ready for another one if we can conceive.”
And it’s not because I’m a Catholic and the Church says that I
should have a big family—because it doesn’t. One might describe the
Catholic Church as “pro-natalist” because of its stance on abortion
and birth control or the history of large Catholic families among
Italians, Irish, and other immigrants. But whatever the Church
teaches officially, Catholics nowadays use birth control at about the
same rates as everyone else.1 And in my forty-seven years as a practic-
ing Catholic, I have never heard a sermon on the value of having
children. I have never been urged in the confessional to have more
kids. There’s no doctrine that it’s holier to end up with more kids.
Of all the Catholic women in history with big families, the Church
has canonized precious few of them, the American educator Elizabeth
Bayley Seton being one of them. The childless Maria Goretti, my con-
firmation saint, is more typical. She was canonized for forgiving her
attempted rapist (and murderer). Meanwhile, her mother, Assunta
Carlini, a devout woman who raised seven children as a widowed
sharecropper in desperate poverty, isn’t a saint.2 Whatever we might
say about the Catholic Church and natalism (and that would be a
separate book), it would be difficult to make a case that there is any
kind of social norm among Catholics to have big families. Nothing to
my mind sums this up better than Pope Francis’s airplane quip that
women don’t have to breed “like rabbits” to be good Catholics—a
comment I found deeply offensive.3
Then there is another more personal reason that isn’t the answer.
When I got married, my husband was a widowed father of six. He

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didn’t “need” more kids, we had our hands full, and we could have
counted ourselves happy if we had raised those children and dedi-
cated the balance of our lives to research and teaching. He already
had tenure in philosophy, and I hoped to follow in an academic job.
I was a graduate student in a top economics program. I had a promis-
ing “career” in front of me, and the sensible thing would have been
to finish that program on time and seek a tenure-track job like my
husband. And yet—we had more children anyway. By the time I
finished my doctoral work, we had six more kids. A tenure-track job
seemed out of the question.
So if those are not the answers, what is the answer? It’s hard to
say. I suppose it boils down to some sort of deeply held thing, possibly
from childhood—a platinum conviction—that the capacity to con-
ceive children, to receive them into my arms, to take them home, to
dwell with them in love, to sacrifice for them as they grow, and to
delight in them as the Lord delights in us, that that thing, call it
motherhood, call it childbearing, that that thing is the most worth-
while thing in the world—the most perfect thing I am capable of
doing.
But that is not easy to say. Not on a train, not in a dental chair,
and not in the checkout line at a grocery store. That day on the train,
I began to wonder if other women who shared my choices had ideas
about why they do this, and better ways of explaining it. I began to
wonder if it was a common experience, and if so, whether it had a
common expression. Did it have a story? Did it have a name? So I
went in search of reasons, perhaps to know my own for the first time.
Hannah’s Children is the result of this search. In summer 2019, I and
my colleague Emily Reynolds traveled to ten American regions and
interviewed fifty-five women with five or more children to find out
why they do what they do and what they think it means—for them-
selves, for their families, and for the nation.

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As it happens, in a two-child world trending to a one-child

world,4 the desire for children and how it is charted in relation to
competing human goods isn’t a small thing. It’s a really big thing—the
thing that ultimately says how many of us there are and what kind of
people we will be. Birth rates and childbearing are not a question of
merely personal interest. There is no more economically significant
question than where people come from, and nothing more deeply
informs the way we order our lives together than the first society we
experience: the family. So Hannah’s Children sits squarely at the inter-
section of personal and professional interests for me.
I will make the argument for the economic importance of this
work in chapter 4, but my method notably breaks with Nobel econo-
mist Gary Becker’s seminal approach to the economics of the family.5
Becker argued that the childbearing desires of a household are prop-
erly outside the scope of economic analysis. The “economic” approach,
he argued, assumes “that individuals maximize their utility from basic
preferences that do not change rapidly over time. . . .”6 In Becker’s work,
household demand for children is modeled like a “consumer” prefer-
ence: a simple taste for a good that is informed by things outside the
analysis of the economists. We take desires as given. This isn’t the
whole of the story, but in general economists have moved away from
qualitative work, preferring deterministic models with fixed prefer-
ences and quantitative studies using samples large enough to make
statistical inferences based on probability models.
In contrast, the heart of the project of this book is conversations
with a small number of women about the nature of their childbearing
decisions. Since my sample is not large enough to be representative
of women with large families in general, each subject is herself, N=1.
The narratives that make up my data do not yield descriptive statistics
or causal inferences. But as MIT economist Michael J. Piore has
pointed out, “What open-ended interviews do yield, and yield

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consistently, are stories the respondents tell. The story is the ‘observa-
tion.’ The stories are basically narratives. The question is thus what
to do with the stories. Typically, stories are not analyzed as statistical
data; stories are ‘interpreted.’ . . . The stories [act] not as data points
but to suggest particular revisions in theory.”7 It is in this spirit that
I took up this work: to find the stories that may ultimately assist in a
revision of economic theories about birth rates and population
growth.
The wholesale abandonment of qualitative work in economics,
especially open-ended interviews, has been a mistake. Economists
should still take N=1 seriously. This is not the time to make that argu-
ment in full except by giving witness to the fruits of its method. For
today, I do not see this book as an exercise in doing economics. But
I understand it as an economic exercise. In a minimal sense, I want
to understand household demand for children better than our cur-
rent theories, not one of which can really explain the macro trends
in birth rates that now puzzle the world. I also want to understand
the supply of children better than our current theories. Families don’t
“demand” children in the way that consumers demand goods and
services; they are both demanders and suppliers of the same good.
What is wanted, if it is wanted, is not just any child but a child of one’s
own. The upshot of this is that it is hard to know whether falling birth
rates are more of a demand shift (fewer children wanted) or more of
a supply shift (fewer children produced) or both. And if we expand
our analysis to suppose that children are not “consumed” in a single
period of time but experienced over a longer horizon, these
demand-and-supply questions become even more fraught.
It doesn’t take long puzzling over the problem of childbearing
desires to see that there are Gordian knots to be untangled, the threads
of which have monumental significance. In times past birth rates were
mostly governed by things very far from personal preference, such as

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famines, disease, crops, sex, marriage, death—fortune and fate. But with
modern economic growth and efficient birth control, household fertility
desires become an object deserving of study apart and aside from mere
sexual appetite. In a contraceptive age, children will not come unless
the capacity for childbearing is switched “on.” Their existence is depen-
dent on our willingness to let them in, on our motives and desires. This
is a book about those desires: not sexual desires, but desires that now
change the course of nations.
Of course, we don’t merely desire and choose. We evaluate our
desires and choices, making judgments about and revising them.
American philosopher Harry Frankfurt called these evaluations “sec-
ond order.” He wrote: “Many animals appear to have the capacity for
what I shall call ‘first-order desires’ . . . desires to do or not to do one
thing or another. No animal other than man, however, appears to
have the capacity for reflective self-evaluation that is manifested in
the formation of second-order desires.”8 The woman on the train
connected the size of my family to the character of my marriage. Such
a connection would give rise to the second-order desires that Harry
Frankfurt described: regrets or satisfaction, shame or pride, sadness
or joy. In short, second-order desires arise from the meaning we
attach to our choices, looking back.
So a book about motives for having children would be incomplete
without the meanings that women attach to the choices they have
made—the reasons they wanted kids and the reasons they kept want-
ing them. To that end, I asked the women in my study to tell me how
it started and how it’s going. I have presented their stories in as raw
and unedited a form as possible. It was an unqualified privilege to
hear the reasons of the heart I am about to share with you.

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