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It was somewhere between the third and fourth child that Catherine Pakaluk had a revelation.
“There was this sense that, ‘Oh, this isn’t getting any harder, in fact, maybe it’s getting easier’,” she mused on motherhood. “I can only describe it like an athlete getting a high when they’re at peak performance. The feeling that it’s not hard any more, but everything you did to get there was hard.”
So she decided to have four more, stopping only when she found herself, aged 40, physically unable to carry another.
Pakaluk, an economics professor, was doing her bit to head off a phenomenon she and other pronatalists refer to as the “birth dearth”.
Pronatalism, literally meaning pro-birth, is a broad ideological movement driven by concern that the world is no longer producing enough children and that society should do something to fix it.
As the number of babies dwindles, the number of workers shrinks with it, creating a myriad of economic, political and social consequences already being felt in places such as Japan and Italy.
The total fertility rate in the US...