What about the rates of abortion in Latin America, where almost every country is Catholic and abortion is illegal? Per capita, the rates are higher than those in the U.S. and Canada, where it’s legal.
Should we use TFR to describe how Catholic a country is? Absolutely not. Fertility rates in a country drop after it industrializes. That happened in every country, well before abortion became legal.
I think there’s a big problem for this issue. Prior to industrialization, most people were farmers or agriculture workers. Having more kids meant getting more income. That was true over the entire course of Christian history until the 19th century, when for the first time, women could independently get income by working in a factory (look at the Lowell Mill Girls, who left farms to work in textile factories, for example – the same thing going on in China and Bangladesh today).
Prior to industrialization, the world was a very different place for women. In the earliest days of Christianity, the Church provided income for virgins and widows, who didn’t need to get married as a result. Otherwise, under the Julian laws of the Roman empire, virgins – both men and women – were heavily penalized, as were young widows who didn’t get married. The Roman Empire needed babies – and they forced women to become mothers. The city of Rome itself didn’t have enough babies to keep the population up, and depended on immigration to do so.
Child-bearing was a risky business for women in the ancient world. Just think of the number of episiotomies that women today get… now imagine that in the ancient world, prior to modern surgery, germ theory, or antibacterials. Women often died young, and men would frequently remarry, resulting in an often-large difference in age between husbands and wives. Only rich girls got educated, and most did not. Roman law only required that a wife had already had a period, and even marriages to prepubescent girls could be validated if it was later consummated after her first menses.
Christianity offered a different life for women. According to a study by Rodney Stark, Christian women in the Roman Empire were significantly less likely to be married by age 18 than were pagan women. Looking at the Church Fathers, many of them talk about orders of widows and orders of virgins, which suggests that the Church offered a reprise from the Russian Roulette of childbearing. Christian women, devoting themselves to Christ, had greater opportunity for learning than pagan women did.
One example of how women refraining from childbearing were admired in the ancient Christian world is the second-century “novela,”
The Acts of Paul and Thecla. St. Thecla (recognized as a saint by the Catholic Church) was celebrated as a heroine for refusing to get married, and for her passionate devotion to Christ. People tried to force her to marry, but she refused, and stayed a virgin. That novela was extremely popular in early Christianity, to the point that devotion to St. Thecla is found extensively in archaeology of later centuries.
I take Thecla as a stark example of how wrong it is to say that TFR is a way to measure Catholicism. I think St. Thecla could be used in modern times to share the story of an ancient super-heroine saint who refused to use her body sexually as expected by the society in which she lived. In modern times, look at how teenage girls are pressured to “pay for love” by having sex by mainstream culture. Thecla could be an example of a strong woman who didn’t bow to that bargain, but who embraced the love of Christ and who walked her own path.
Overall, I don’t think Catholics should pressure women to get married and have kids. I think we should use Ignatian spirituality instead: asking what someone truly wants with their life, and finding the want that takes them to God. Too often, the pro-life movement in particular has suggested that having a big family is a sign of true devotion to the faith. To me, that looks like we’re becoming the Roman Emperors again, pressuring women to become mothers when they don’t feel the calling. Rejecting that calling has too often been presented as a black/white choice between becoming a big-family Catholic or a single Atheist. Thecla (and modern NFP) shows that a single, non-fertile person can be totally devoted to holiness.
