Why Religious Families Have More Children

Religious families have more children because they are religious.

In Israel, the official fertility estimate for Haredi women in 2020 to 2022 was 6.38 children. For secular Jewish women it was 1.98. The same pattern appears across countries and religions: the more religious the community, the more children it tends to have.1

That sounds almost tautological. It is not. Religion does more than make children meaningful. It gives people a reason to have another child after the ordinary reasons have begun to run out.

The first child can be explained by longing. The second may complete the picture of a family. Eventually the question changes. Why have one more when the family already feels whole?

That is where the difference appears.

IThe next child

I am writing this as a father. Pregnancy and motherhood are not mine to describe. My subject is what happens to a man's life when he becomes responsible for children he loves deeply.

Every child opens another route by which the world can reach you: a fever, a diagnosis, a phone call in the middle of the night, a decision you cannot reverse. The child acquires a life of his own. The father acquires a permanent vulnerability to it.

The sleepless nights pass. The exposure does not. Children grow, and so do the number of ways their pain can become mine.

At some point, another child may add nothing to my flourishing. He may leave less time for my marriage, less attention for the children already here, less coherence in the household. I may love him infinitely once he exists. That does not mean it was rational, beforehand, to choose the added burden and risk.

The unborn child cannot say that I deprived him. He does not yet stand before me with a claim. The cost is mine, and the risk extends to everyone already in my care.

If flourishing is the highest good, the arithmetic bends toward fewer children. It would be strange if it did not.

The dog in a baby stroller has become a perfect emblem of this moral world. There is nothing wrong with loving a dog. But the stroller remains while the human claim that once filled it has come to look too expensive, too binding, and too dangerous.

IIWhen more was also safer

The tradition itself contains a practical argument for having more children. In Yevamot, Rabbi Yehoshua teaches that a man who had children in his youth should have more in his old age:

בַּבֹּקֶר זְרַע אֶת זַרְעֶךָ וְלָעֶרֶב אַל תַּנַּח יָדֶךָ

In the morning sow your seed, and in the evening do not let your hand rest.

The reason is uncertainty: "You do not know which will prosper, this or that, or whether both alike will be good."2

That uncertainty was not abstract. For most of human history, roughly half of children did not survive to puberty. In such a world, another child was not only another surface of risk. He was also a hedge against the disappearance of the family itself.3

The private arithmetic pointed in one direction.

Then one of humanity's greatest achievements changed it. In modern affluent societies, nearly every child is expected to live. Another child no longer serves as the same hedge against family extinction. That benefit has shrunk while the responsibility remains entire.

Kohelet's words can therefore look almost reversed. If I know, with far greater confidence, that the children of the morning will live, why not let my hand rest in the evening? If family coherence and happiness are the measure, restraint may look wiser than continuation.

The verse still says not to let your hand rest. The old practical explanation is no longer enough.

IIIWhere the calculation ends

Survival settles only one part of the question. Even if I know that a child will live, can I assume that existence is a benefit to him?

Beit Shammai and Beit Hillel argued for two and a half years over whether it would have been better for man to be created. They concluded:

נוֹחַ לוֹ לָאָדָם שֶׁלֹּא נִבְרָא יוֹתֵר מִשֶּׁנִּבְרָא

It would have been preferable for man not to have been created than to have been created.

Now that he has been created, the Gemara says, he should examine his deeds.4

Chazal refuse the easy claim that existence is obviously a gift from the recipient's point of view. Once a person exists, his duty is clear. Before he exists, he cannot ask for life, consent to it, or say that he was deprived of it.

By this point, both arguments from benefit have failed. Another child is no longer needed to secure the family's survival, and I cannot prove that I benefit him by creating him. Meanwhile, the cost to the existing family remains real.

A philosophy centered on flourishing reaches a simple answer: at some point, stop.

IVWhat you were commanded

This is why Hezekiah is decisive.

Hezekiah refused to have children because he saw through prophecy that bad sons would come from him. His calculation was not a guess. It rested on prophecy. A father could not be more certain of a bad outcome. Isaiah still told him he was wrong.

בַּהֲדֵי כִּבְשֵׁי דְרַחֲמָנָא לָמָּה לָךְ

Why involve yourself with the hidden things of the Merciful One?

"What you were commanded, you should do," Isaiah tells him. The outcome belongs to God.5

Isaiah does not promise that Hezekiah's forecast will prove false. He says that the forecast does not decide. The hidden outcome belongs to God. The command belongs to Hezekiah.

The private calculation can compare costs and benefits. It cannot produce an obligation that remains after the benefits disappear. A command can.

Peru u'revu is a command. The world was created lashevet, to be inhabited. The Rambam says that even after the basic mitzvah has been fulfilled, a person should continue as long as he has strength, because adding one soul is like building a world.6

That is why religious families have more children. Religion gives a father a reason to proceed even when N + 1 is not safer. Safety, coherence, and self-fulfillment no longer have final authority.

I still see the surface area of risk. Fatherhood has taught me how accurately the equation describes life. The mitzvah begins with the same facts and reaches beyond them.