The baby bust afoot in the West is getting attention from politicians and pundits on both sides of the aisle. Panic about falling birthrates now transcends ideological divides.

The longstanding progressive contention is that, per mainstream feminist Jill Filipovic, “women are having fewer babies because they have more choices.” But this notion is given the lie by studies showing that women today are having not just fewer babies than women used to, but fewer babies than they want.

Educated women are uniformly expected to take professional formation more seriously than they take family formation. Moreover, modern motherhood is popularly understood to be—and often is—extremely difficult and profoundly lonely. Consequently, regret about having not prioritized motherhood when facing waning fertility in one’s late 30s and early 40s is commonly felt, but rarely expressed.

Meanwhile, the economic and cultural peril wrought by below-replacement fertility is a horrifying specter with which few of us are prepared to grapple, and for which even fewer of us can propose any feasible solution.

So, a pressing question emerges: How can the West both retain the fruits of modernity (as defined by advanced medicine, equality for women, and the like) and also make motherhood appealing (that is, convince more women with a range of options to give birth more times, despite what Filopovic accurately identifies as today’s broader range of female choices)?

Here’s one answer: Honest feminists, who are willing to put women’s and families’ well-being ahead of mainstream feminist zeitgeist, should endorse and seek to incentivize religious participation.

Religious affiliation is correlated with fertility: In 2015, American women identifying as Christian gave birth to an average of 2.2 children while those identifying as unaffiliated gave birth to an average of 1.7. Among Jewish women, those claiming Judaism as a religion as well as an ethnicity have an average of 1.7 children, whereas those who identify as Jewish but claim no religion have an average of 1. Greater religiosity as defined by observance also correlates with more children: Orthodox Jewish women have an average of 3.3, while those that identify as conservative and reform have an average of 1.8 and 1.4, respectively. Religious practice is correlated with fertility as well: In 2016, women who practiced no religion gave birth to an average of just under 2.5 children, while women who attended religious services at least once per week gave birth to closer to 3.5. Meanwhile, the propensity of more educated women to have fewer children can be offset by religious practice. In Britain and France in 2021, highly educated women who claimed no religious faith had given birth to an average of 1.85 children, while highly educated women who practice Catholicism had given birth to an average of 2.45.

Attempting a great awakening and an attendant increase in fertility would require three changes of intellectual and practical orientation on the part of those who want to change feminism from within.

First, we need to get a lot more comfortable with a “shoot for the moon, and even if you miss, you’ll still land among the stars” concept of sexual morality, rather than expecting every decision of our own to be validated by every institution in which we participate.

Many religious institutions set the bar for sexual morality high enough that most believers have always failed to reach it. That is not a reason to eschew religion. After all, most of us also fail to love our neighbor quite as ourselves; but no one, as far as I know, deems social justice pointless for this reason. Why should sexual morality be any different?

At age 30 in 1993, in an interview with America Magazine, Andrew Sullivan, a practicing Catholic and a gay man who was a revolutionary voice for marriage equality in the 1990s and 2000s, offered this reflection on sexual sin: “I know that there are many things within homosexual life that can be wrong—just as in heterosexual life they can be wrong. There are many things in my sexual and emotional life that I do not believe are spiritually pure, in any way.”

Sullivan’s capacious understanding is one that those presently taking mainstream feminism to task for its total elimination of sexual mores that protect women’s unique vulnerability would do well to adopt: We can acknowledge our own impurity without either self-hatred or insistence on its reclassification as purity. That is, the religious standard of sexual morality need not change in order for those who do not meet said standard to find a home in a religious community.

I met my husband and many of my college friends and acquaintances in the Catholic student center of our hyper-progressive, non-sectarian, Ivy League university. Universally bucking the trend among similarly educated peers, almost all of our cohort got married before age thirty; many, like my husband and me, were in our mid-twenties. Now in our mid-thirties, all of us have at least two children, and many of us have three or more.

Most of us (like most church-attending people throughout history) would not have passed muster at a purity ball.

Still, most of us could distinguish between virtue and vice as our religion defined them (regardless of which side we were on at a given moment). Moreover, most of us spent a lot more time on the virtuous side of the divide (and, well, time with a lot fewer people and a lot more future spouses on the less virtuous side) than our secular peers.

So, in the end: We married in churches and had children whom we baptized and took to mass—becoming civically indistinguishable from saints, and paragons of the countercultural fertility that many critics of mainstream feminism want to incentivize.

Second, we need to reject the orthodoxy of “personal choice” by acknowledging the shallow nihilism of many who embrace the tenets of mainstream feminism unto an eternal “child-free” existence and the civic responsibility of many who answer the call to birth and to raise the next generation are not morally neutral “choices.”

When a mainstream feminist like Jill Filopovic contends, not unjustifiably, that women are having fewer children (and fewer women are having children) in part because we have more choices, we need to get comfortable responding: Sure, but (due acknowledgment of the slim minority of childless people that forego parenthood in pursuit of a different and equally worthy mission aside) some choices are better—more socially useful, and more civically worthy—than others. There is societal value for all in the rearing of the next generation, even though its work is disproportionately undertaken by some. There is only individual value for some (and dubious value at that) in the freedom of the “child free” to pursue unimpeded hedonism.

A feminist embrace of religious practice would represent a valiant attempt to make (earlier) marriage and (increased) fertility cool again.

In her 2013 book, Adam and Eve After the Pill, Mary Eberstadt insightfully argues that we have stripped sex of its moral valences only to project those judgments onto food. Once, mainstream Westerners prized virginity and had never heard of veganism. Today, most of us look at vegans with a certain admiration and at regular fast-food eaters with some derision; but our disposition toward virgins is neutral to contemptuous and the mainstream embrace of sexual practices like polyamory is becoming a new cultural frontier. So, we remain capable of making judgments, but we are selective about where we focus our judgmental attention.

I am confident, for example, that Filopovic would probably not celebrate that fewer people consume whole, unprocessed foods today because we have more choices. We all know that bananas are better for us—and for everyone—than Cheetos.

Well, married parenthood of multiple kids is like bananas: Once, it was the only option; now, it is the ideal option, regardless of whether it seems like the tastiest one.

Third and finally, we need to recognize the profound limitations of intellectual argumentation and individual persuasion to simultaneously impact familial, social, and civic phenomena like people’s willingness to embrace a(nother) child.

In “The Case for One More Child,” published in Plough in 2021, Ross Douthat makes an argument for greater fertility among married couples that, in its fundamental reliance on the Christian concept of a vocational call to holiness, underlines the futility of any secular argument for the same.

After explaining that it would be good to make larger families more affordable, and thus to instigate a virtuous cycle of child-friendly policies that lead to larger families that in turn lead to even more child-friendly policies, Douthat gets down to the fundamentals: “If I didn’t have kids there’s a 5 percent chance that I’d be doing something more radical in pursuit of sainthood; there’s a 95 percent chance that I’d just be a more persistent sinner, a more selfish person, because no squalling infant or tearful nine-year-old is there to force me to live for her and not myself.”

In other words: For the normal and normative and not particularly saintly among us, the stewardship and offering of well-loved and well-enough-raised children is best understood as a disposition of generosity toward God and His world.

Having acknowledged this, Douthat ends his argument for more kids on a rather pessimistic note: “The large family as a spiritual discipline, children as a life hack that might crack the door of heaven—if that’s the worldview required to make our society capable of reproducing itself again, then we’re waiting not for child tax credits, better work-life balance, or more lenient car-seat laws, but for a radical conversion of our hardened modern hearts.”

Well, yes and no.

I posit that the willingness to embrace a(nother) child might actually be less about the worldview one imbibes than about the particular corner of the world in which one lives. This is why infusing religious practice into more people’s lives, regardless of what beliefs they ultimately hold, might be the most important prong in a return to prioritizing family formation and growth.

I was 27, 29, and 33 when I had each of my three children. I am 36 now, and my fourth child will arrive in a few weeks. I am the first to acknowledge that modern motherhood, with its assumption of total self-sufficiency and its lack of practical communal support, is not easy. Not even for people like me, who are blessed with physical health, nearby and relatively young parents, and financial security—much less for women lacking any or all of these assets.

Still, I have never experienced the existential loneliness in motherhood that so many women my age have experienced. Partly, that’s because every time I had a baby, I had at least one friend, and usually far more than one, due in the same year—along with many friends, themselves mothers of two and three and four children, offering me hand-me-downs, gifts, and advice. Relatedly, I understood even in the throes of sleep deprivation that the work and sacrifice of motherhood is not so much a personal choice as it is a civic service.

For these communal and spiritual realities that have made my experience of motherhood so much easier, I have the routine, communal practice of Catholicism—even more than its tenets, teachings, or beliefs—to thank.

The sexual revolution begot cultural sterilization because it first begot the cultural atomization of secularization. A feminist embrace of religious practice would represent a valiant attempt to make (earlier) marriage and (increased) fertility cool again. After all, if feminism is about helping women fulfill their ambitions, and one prevailing ambition among women today is to mother more children, then the feminist embrace of institutional religion should be a no-brainer to anyone who puts women’s actual well-being ahead of mainstream feminist ideology.

Not to mention that the resultant bump in fertility might help Western society to survive, and perhaps even to thrive, in the globally complex world that is already here.