We're back with another edition of the Federalist Radio Hour. I'm Emily Trishinsky,
culture editor here at the Federalist. As always, you can email the show
at radio at the Federalist dot com, follow us on x at FDR LST,
make sure to subscribe wherever you download your podcasts, and of course to
the premium version of the Federalist dot com as well. Today we are joined
by a professor at the Catholic University of America, Catherine Pacolic. She's the
author of a new book. It is out now. It is called Hannah's
Children, The Women Quietly Defying the Birth Dearth. Catherine, thank you so
much for joining us. You're welcome, all right, So tell us a
little bit about I think this is your first time on Federalist Radio Hour.
If you could just tell us a little bit about your little background in your
career and how you got to where you are writing this book on the women
who are quietly defying the Birth Dearth with that great rhyme in it. Yeah.
Sorry, it's a bit of a mouthful, right, this title east
great. Later we can talk about how the book got this strange long mouthful
of the title. There's actually a story there, which isn't a bad story,
but I'm not unhappy with it. Yeah. So I teach at the
Catholic University of America, So I'm kind of like a lot of people.
Maybe I practice what I preach, or at least I practiced what I write
about, which is sort of I call this like my second career I had.
I you know, went to grad school and right after well, let's
right before I got married. After college, this was like the year nineteen
ninety eight ninety nine, hoped we would be blessed with children. We were
blessed with children. So I really took my time goving through graduate school.
And that has its ups and its downs. You know that you go through
graduate school and you're kind of you know, are you doing the mom thing
right? So you're worried about getting relegated to second class citizenship and all those
things. And I was at Harvard, which is a you know, a
place where you have a lot of people, well people don't have kids when
they're when they're doing their PhD. People look at you like, oh,
so you're like not gonna have a You're not going to do anything anymore.
You're just gonna drop out and you're like, well, I wasn't planning to
drop out, but you know, maybe I'm on a slightly slowered track.
No, So that was me for a lot of time, for a lot
of years. It was like twelve years, and we were blessed with lots
of kids, more kids than we expected to be blessed with. So I
had six kids in graduate school and then got out of grad school and thought,
you know, I finished. You know, that was like a miracle.
I thought, well, this is really great. I finished, and
now just kind of write books, right, And but then I had an
opportunity to start teaching at Auvy Marie University in Florida. My husband also is
a professor, and so we went there together and we kind of gave it
a shot. Could we do this joint teaching thing? And I super loved
it, and you know, we lived across the street from university, made
a lot of great friends, and basically, you know, continue to raise
my children. And then about eight years ago we came up here to Ethic
University, and my kids were older, and so I was able to kind
of consider a tenure track position, which requires more research. And so that's
been the last few years. Was kind of working on some old research from
grad school and kind of chewing on something bigger, like what was the bigger
thing I thought I could contribute, And so that has its own kind of
genesis. But yeah, that's kind of how I got here, was about
five six years ago, thinking I think this is something I could contribute and
would be useful on a lot of levels, and so I dove in and
it's been a long process. Yeah, about six years. Let's just pause
though for a second. Do you have six children while doing grad school?
I did? I did. That's amazing. Yeah, it was well,
yeah, I mean you don't think of yourself as amazing, but I know
that it surprises people. But I will say that there's a there's a photo
which I could I could share with with you later, but that was kind
of an iconic photo that was part of this tweet storm about six years ago
when I started this research. Around that same time I was contemplating this project,
the President of France had this, like, you know, pompous thing
that he said about how if we could just get all the women in school,
they would stop having babies. And of course he's referring to brown people
in Africa and not you know, not anybody else, because it would be
good if they stopped having babies, right, So it's really obnoxious and I
thought, well, this is ridiculous. So I kind of tweeted a photo
of myself with my six kids in my graduation gown and I was like,
well, yeah, so not everybody's going to get a degree and then stop
having kids. And anyway, I woke up in the morning, it was
like, oh, two hundred thousand people looked at that, and so it
went around. It was really super fun. But yeah, so I mean
I just didn't want to gloss over like so spectacular and it's so relevant to
what you wrote. Yeah, and you know, just being around young conservative
women as I'm sure you are and you've been a teacher. Yeah. But
from my perspective, that's one of the questions you get all the time is
they're sort of caught between this rock and hard place. They don't know if
they're being told to go into the world as sort of working professionals and their
lives into these these career oriented missions, or if they're being called, you
know, into the domestic space specifically and to because we can get into the
whole like trad conversation everything too. Yeah, for young women, not just
conservative women, but also just young women of faith. I'm sure you're asked
all the time how you did it, how you can both, how it
feels like you had it all. What do you say when people ask you
that? Yeah, so I like to say that you can do a lot
of things, but you have to be okay to like, I don't know
how to put it, like, you're not going to have everything at the
same time, right, and then actually you don't have to make certain decisions
before you have to make them. So a lot of times I hear young
women say, well, you know, I know I want to have a
family, so I kind of think maybe I shouldn't go to grad school.
And I'm looking at them like, well, you're not dating it. I
mean, well why not go to grad school? Like it's actually works in
their way, like, you know, seize the moment you've got that in
front of you. In fact, I often tell young women like get the
you know, get the things done now that you can't do later. Don't
don't work, and then go back to grad school. Get the grad school
done now. So what I always say is sort of the thing that's key
is to prioritize family, because family is this like it's a clock that ticks,
right. I mean, you can't You can't as easily start a family
in your thirties as you can younger. Not everybody meets the right spouse when
they're young. But if you do meet the right spouse, like, don't
have any qualms about it, you can prioritize that. And actually it's never
been easier to sort of fit the passions and the interests that you have into
the interstitial spaces around having children. But you just have to give it its
due, right, it has its time. And so you know, while
it sounds amazing, and you're really gracious to say that it's amazing that I
had six children in grad school, I just want to make it really clear
that on the inside it felt like being a failure, right, But that's
okay, Like you can live with feeling like a failure for a while.
Why because on the inside nobody finished is there, Like like my peers in
grad school had tenure before I finished my PhD. That feels like I'm not
going to go anywhere with this or I can't make a contribution, you know,
But you know, persevering, you just kind of stick with you.
You go, Okay, my, you know what. Look, I have
all this richness, I have the things that I cared most about. I
put those things first, and you know, God, I do think God,
you know open stores that we don't always see at the beginning. So
I know that's was that clear without a good answer, and this is like,
you know what I'm getting at here, that's an incredible answer. No,
I think that, yeah, makes a lot of sense. And it's
one that I've heard from other women in similar situations. Not that there are
a lot of you who have managed to have all of this, but when
people do, I hear similar things from them, And you know that's I
think it's just sorting out your priorities right, and just putting first things first
and having a great partner too. I would imagine that's, you know,
maybe the biggest piece of the puzzle. Yeah, it is a huge piece
of the puzzle. Yeah. Absolutely. And yeah, and I want to
agree that your your point of about the TRAADWAF conver that's happening right now.
I mean, these things are kind of fraud and they're kind of like,
from my perspective, a tiny bit silly because when you've kind of gone through
it for thirty years, you're like, okay, ladies, like, calm
down, it's going to be fine. It's going to be all right.
You don't have to pick between like little house and the prairie and like,
you know, girl boss, it is actually, you know, probably a
good life. Like a lot of things. It's you know, it's going
to reflect like to the different colors in you. And you don't have to
see the future. You know, you don't have to like map it out,
and you don't even have to decide you can you can. Now,
I don't want to sound like I'm selling a bill of goods. It's just
that the longer term perspective. Yes, you have to say notice and things.
The great partner. Yeah, I don't want to minimize that. My
husband's a professor. We share this life. It's kind of the family business.
I thank him well, after God, he's the first person thinked in
my book and I say that a great spouse is the silent co author on
anything that you produce or your work. So yeah, we're both very conscious
to that and super grateful. Yeah. Yeah, no, that makes a
lot of sense. Yeah, Yeah, it's just it's wonderful. I think
a very helpful a reminder as well. For I just young women are so
confused and we can talk about them a little bit and we can't. Yeah,
can you tell us you hinted that there's something interesting, an interesting story
behind the title. Can you tell us a little bit about that. Yeah,
maybe it would be just given the conversation we just had, this is
a really good moment to transition to that. So one of the problems if
you're going to write about people who have like, let's say, above average
family sizes, one of the problems you have is the concern that you're kind
of aiming to normalize a number of children in particular, or kind of create
some kind of you know, positive So it's actually I didn't want to do
that, and I didn't. It wasn't something that I heard about from lots
of So with the women I met who had five, six, seven,
you know, ten, twelve children, none of them set out to have
ten children, Like I didn't set out to heavy eight, right, I
didn't. And so the whole question is like this civilizational question, like how
do people say they want to have three kids but end up with one?
Like how does that exactly happen, right, this is what's happening around the
around. So we've got this whole quirky question of what people desire, what
they want. We talk about fertility desires, we talk about their intentions for
marriage and all these sorts of things. And one of the things that I
discovered and talking to people, talking to women I talk to for this book,
is that I think life is more complicated, right, like, like
we often desire things that are in conflict. Like just we were just talking
about we want to do this, we want to do that, and so
that we can't actually read patterns of success or like we can't read recipes for
success by just kind of like saying, well, I desire this, therefore
will happen. I Mean, we think about like, oh, we all
want to lose weight, but we want to It's not like we don't want
to, right, but we don't succeed a lot of the time, or
maybe most of the time, and we could keep going, right, Like
I'd like to get more exercise and I don't more of the time. So
one of the things I'm really working on in this book is kind of like
what does it mean to desire things? And what does it mean to desire
things maybe that are in conflict, And I think that's a big piece to
the story of following birth rates in this country. And so, okay,
back to the title. Okay, so one hundred percent this book was not
going to be called big families or women with lots of children because that just
wasn't part of the story. And so sorry, something there we go.
So that was the part of the story. So what did I want to
do? Well? The story was sort of more that women I spoke to
were conscious of having desires that changed over time, and their desires were shaped
by things over time, and so searching for some model for what that is
I finally discovered at some point, like actually, the biblical Hannah was a
great example. She's somebody whose priorities we were sort of straight in the sense
she knew she wanted a child, and she prayed to have a child,
but she understood that the blessing of a child was dependent on God's God's blessing,
right, And what does it mean to be dependent on God's blessing?
Is that you you kind of accept or you let go of a certain kind
of overly planned way of life, and that became this common theme I heard
over and over and over, and so how does that make sense in a
larger We could talk about that larger picture, but it was a case where
I wanted to try to describe a kind of attitude about children, and we
can you can maybe see where I'm going, right, It's it's definitely not
the attitude of planned parenthood. Right, so as an institution, right,
a planned parenthood is an institution, but this general cultural sense that kind of
the way the way you size up the goodness of having children is like by
subjecting children to a set of standards that is increasingly becoming higher and higher and
higher, right, Like what are the things you have to have in order
before you can have a child? And that that was the common theme was
a kind of dependence on God's providence and a trust that God would provide for
children, a very clear sense that got to children who are a blessing and
a wealth that you could you could pursue on their own terms. So yeah,
I had to grab an archetype and that archetype is the biblical Hannah and
not a sort of an intended family size, because that was exactly the thing
that women were rejecting it's like, I have an intended family size. Does
that make sense? Absolutely? And I was curious to ask you also about
the sort of conditioning and how that's affected this, because you know, there's
the age old question of culture and economics. Some people see them as two
separate categories, although nobody would argue they're entirely separate from each other. Right,
how do you see that, Catherine, Because there's some really interesting kind
of material explanations that my friends on the left will attribute this to, you
know, student loan at housing costs, all of that versus the kind of
conditioning that you were getting at just now about what you have to do before
you have a child, right right, right? Yeah, So in economics
we tend to see the origin of most things as a demand story. And
now that's so so part of what I was after, and I'm going to
answer your question specifically. Part of what I was after was kind of is
this a demand story or a supply story? And so what do I mean?
A demand story would be this is just people who don't want children as
much as in the past, right, That would be a demand story.
A supply story would be these are people who want the same number of children
as in the past, but they're constrained somehow, right, Like it's housing
costs, it's right, So the cost of having children has become you know,
just oppressive, and we can't we can't have children anymore. Right.
So that's maybe another way of putting it when we talk about the economics in
that sense, you know, is this a demand story or a supply story.
Whenever we get to the demand story, we really are talking about the
cultural side. So that's that's what you mean by the cultural side. So
it's it's rendered, it's it's a story or an explanation or a theory.
That's that's it's served up to us in economic terms, But it's a story
about kind of cultural dominance, right, It's a cultural story first. But
then what happens like in markets, right, Like, if you want bad
things, markets always can provide you with bad things cheaply and quickly. Right,
So we know that, right, That's one of the best critiques of
the market is that it's too good at getting us what we want, and
what we want is bad. It gets us those things too. What that
basically means is that when we want fewer children, or when we don't prioritize
children against other goods, because there's lots of other goods you could want to
have. And I don't have a problem with that, But what we end
up choosing in a sense, ends up telling us like the prices of everything
else, right, Like, for instance, we commonly hear today it ought
to be possible to raise a child in one income. Right. We're hearing
that, I mean obviously from the left, and we're hearing it from a
lot of our friends on the right, like what can we do to fix
things? You know? But I just think, as an economist, will
look if it's going to be the case that most families are going to choose
to send two workers into the workforce because that's what they want to do.
It's like you're asking for magic to say that prices will not adjust to a
situations where all the prices are now reflecting the fact that most people want to
have two earners out there. So a sense, it's like the the economics
is really downstream from what it is that people want, and the market is
really good at kind of adjusting, right. And and that's so, as
you said, it's not there. They're intertwined completely, But usually we see
that kind of the market effects are downstream from the culture, things like which
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com. Right, No, that makes sense. Yeah, And Limeanstone has
done some great work on how women are having fewer children, Yes, and
they want to ultimately, h can you talk to us a little bit.
I know you're about this in the book How We Ended Up? There is
a story of women getting married later with fewer resources. Is a you know,
women starting families too late for different reasons. Maybe it's you know,
really as specific as birth control, uh, hurting fertility. Can you talk
to us a little bit about those factors. Yeah, Yeah, And I
would just want to say, like I love Linemen's work, and I've followed
his work for a decade at least I cite him in the book. But
I do always offer this piece of caution about the use of like these simplistic
measures of what women want, just because I think we all want things that
are in conflict. Like I do want to eat lots of brownies and I
do want to lose weight. And those two things are things. They're both
things that I want, right, Like, they're both things that I want.
And so when we see that women say that they want to have more
children than they're having, but they're having fewer. We should be cautious to
assume that the result we see is because women are somehow prevented from doing the
thing that they want. Right, right, I'm not being prevented from losing
weight, And it's not that I don't want it, but I probably want
to eat brownies more so. I mean, so, you know, ultimately
we are, as human beings like bundles of contradictions of our desires. So
that's just a little bit of well noted of caution. That's not to say
that I don't think people would be happier if they did have more children.
It's what they say that they want, and you know, so that's so
that's just a note of caution about that, the use of like these desires
over time. But how do you also, I like the thought of Linemen
putting himself in the position of mel Gibson and what women want. Yeah,
that's that we shouldn't be that any Yeah, I no, no, it's
true. I just think like, as a woman, you're kind of like,
yeah, I know, women want more children than they're having, But
it doesn't mean that there's a bogey man out there that we could point to
that's kind of like preventing us all from having babies, and like, look
at us, we all want to like wear the size too, and we
all want to eat sticky ons. I mean really like, I don't know
how else to put it than that. I just feel like that's that's okay.
Maybe it maybe takes a woman to say, like, yeah, we're
we're bun contradictions, but that's the contradiction. Actually, is what I want
to talk about. When you said how do we get here? So you
know, what you'd have to basically say is like, when we look at
the twentieth century, there's this moment in time and that's really the arrival of
the birth control pill. When and here I would point to the work of
Claudia Golden and Larry Kat's famous paper called The Power of the Pill. And
what we basically see is that the major inflection point in the twentieth century of
women going into the workforce so to speak, married women with children going into
the workforce is really after the arrival of the pill. I mean, nobody
forced women to get on the pill, nobody forced them to go to work.
This was a kind of like slow, organic uptake of something that made
it easier to accomplish something that they probably wanted to do. So I think
there's like not a get out of jail free card in this In this sense,
I mean speaking again women to women here, and you know, setting
the men interpreters of what women want aside. Basically the minute we could land
are the timing of our births with greater accuracy. We all signed up to
do that. The diffusion of the pill in American society is so fast as
to be breathtaking. It wasn't like we needed to incentivize people to use the
bill. It was out there and people were getting it. People women were
getting it for their daughters, right. I mean, they still do,
but this was certainly true in the sixties when Why did women have to get
it for their daughters because it was not supposed to be prescribed for teenagers and
young adults and unmarried people. It was just supposed to be for married people.
So I mean, I just think you have to contend with that fact.
That's what happens is this thing is available that makes it possible to do
what to like get the next degree and postpone your child bearing and kind of
really plan your children into that period, you know, a targeted period of
time, and that's when this big you know, I call it the new
calculus in the book, I say this is the new calculus. This this
basically this technology arrives that allows us to kind of like have our cake,
you eat it too, Like we can have our two kids and we could
do that and we don't have to like be abstinate forever. We still be
coupled up and not be abstinate, and then we can also, you know,
whatever pursue our career interests. I'm not trying to describe this as bad.
It's just what happened. And I think it's actually super normal to want
to have that kind of control over things. So in a sense, I
am questioning, like how basic the desire to have children is and how easy
it is for us to trade that off against other objectively good goods, Like
it's objectively good to do the things I do. I think what you're doing
is objectively good. And so I think that basically the story of the twentieth
century from the perspective of women is being kind of in a bind, like
looking at a bunch of things we want and wanting them both, and the
solution for both people, for most people, when you have two things you'd
like to have, is to have a little bit of both, right,
and your budget constrained. Right, you don't have an unlimited amount of amount
of money. Well, what does it mean to be budget constrained in your
lifetime? That's just being time constrained, right, So you can't have an
infinite number of children and have an infinite number of hours to be in the
workplace. So that's really the story. That's how we got here. And
so that of course, downstream from women going to get more degrees because the
pill is available to them means later marriage, right, So Lynman talks about
later marriage, and that's really important. So later our marriage is a big
piece of this. And of course you just wait ten years out and then
there's this whole norm like now you look like a weirdo if you get married
when you're twenty one, right, Like everybody else is getting a master's degree,
and you're like, oh, I want to get married. Unless you're
in the trad community, you're too late. It's too late to twenty one,
right, No, it's so true. So yeah, like you wait
and then all of a sudden, all these other norms move and then you
have this like overt and window problem. So you have this reinforcement of a
thing that at the beginning was like an experiment and well, now all of
a sudden, it becomes norms. So definitely, later marriage, Definitely pursuing
careers prior to having children instead of like kind of what I did, like
have your kids first and then try to have a second career later, which
a lot of people are now recognizing that it's a better approach and recommending it
to their kids. But there was a lot of just like, whoh,
this is going to be great. We're all going to be like Wall Street
people and wear those big suits with the shoulder pads in nineteen eighties, you
know, I mean that was a and we are seeing, like for college
educated women a little bit of an uptick in birth rates kind of a rebound
after that nineteen eighties ridiculousness. So yeah, is that everything you asked?
I mean, like, how did we get here? Yeah, it's a
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clear, it's not the industrial Revolution. You're going to hear that from a
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the reasons I love Mary Eberstatt's book, Private Screams Issue. That's a great
one. Oh my gosh, it's so good. And you write a lot
about this, and you mentioned earlier the kind of civilizational Uh, I say,
kind of civilizational. But it's a huge it is a big question,
and I want to ask you that in the context of the sort of transhumanist
IVF, a huge conversation that's been gripping, you know, these news cycles
over the last month or so. Just can you talk to us a little
bit about how transhumanism and I don't I don't see that in a specific sense
of you know, transgenderism or anything. I mean in the sort of sense
of man and machine, you know, melding in ways that they have been
since time of Memoriam, but in a way that's accelerated. Right now,
How is all of that you talked to us about the civilizational question, talk
to us about uh, technology and all of that, and how it's sort
of snowballing right now. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, I mean like
I'm almost overwhelmed, Like yeah, like I just want to say, yeah,
what you said, that's exactly right. It's all stumbling. I mean,
maybe help, Yeah, you already read. I mean, what I'm
sort of adding to the conversation is like a reminder that something is simple,
so to speak, Like we don't even think about birth control as being,
you know, in any sense like transhumanist or you know, part of the
machine. But in a sense, maybe I'm kind of pushing us to reconsider
if it's part of the machine. Now. I ended up saying that I
think, like all of these technologies, they end the technologies themselves, are
their their capacities to do certain things right, to embrace the different lifestyle.
But what we what we I guess a message something like I learned from my
own book, if that's fair to say, is kind of like in the
face of these sorts of things, it's not sufficient to say, well,
I don't think that's a good path, like I don't think you know,
maybe this kind of sergacy is good, or any sergacy at all, or
we're rejecting IVF. It's not sufficient to outline like, well, you know,
maybe somebody thinks birth could role is intrinsically wrong. It doesn't get at
the at the heart of the problem because it's it's right. It's like to
say, like live a good human life would mean like not to murder anybody,
not to like, you know, thief, thief anybody. Like,
Well, it's not just to not commit wrong things, right, A good
human life is to kind of understand the meaning of human life and to pattern
your life after like we use to use the word civilizational health, like patterns
of civilizational goodness. We could some true well being. Sometimes people say authentic
flourishing, right, So describing that and getting a grip on that, for
me, that was the kind of the gold nugget in this project was that
it's not sufficient to say, well, look like, obviously, if South
Korea is having zero point six children at this point, I mean, like
per woman, Like, that's obviously there's going to be no more Koreans at
some point soon. And we don't want to be like that. But what
does it look like to not do that? Like what do you have to
believe and think about? And well would it take to teach those things to
other people? I mean, so I think like, in the face of
this entire calamity that you just described, I feel like that what it really
does. I think as conservatives we look a little flat footed. Sometimes we're
like, oh, okay, I think I'm against that. I'm against that
too, So you know, it's like it's not sufficient to be you know,
against abortion. I mean, we have to be against abortion, but
we also have to somehow describe the goods that are available to us as persons
when we go ahead and like take the hit, like you take the hit
and you welcome a life when it wasn't like timed right or you right?
So what does that look like? And of course that means we have to
sort of be comfortable describing things like sacrifice and suffering and meaning and purpose.
So I don't know if that's all too much, but it's somehow to say
that. I think there's like a second job to be done, and describing,
not rejecting transhumanism on its own right or solely, but also kind of
describing what it looks like to live this like messy, like hard scrabble kind
of complete human life with all of its you know, complication or its conflicting
desires and just trying to work it out and rank things properly. That's a
that's a job some of us can devote ourselves to. Yeah, that's so
wonderfully said. I love the way that you put the I could keep going
all day. Catherine Pacollock is a professor at the Catholic University of America the
author of the new book. It is out now. It is called Hannah's
Children, The Women Quietly Defying the Birth Dearth. It is another exceptional addition
to this conversation in this space. So, Catherine, thank you so much
for joining us. So welcome. Emily. Oh yeah, we'll have to
do it again soon. It is so interesting conversation. Yeah, just appreciate
it. You're welcome. Oh, sorry, you're welcome. Thank you,
Katherine. I'm a Ladyship Ski culture editor here at The Federalist. We'll be
back soon with more. Until then, be lovers of freedom and anxious for
the fray.