Why Do Mormons Have So Many Kids?

[Hector_St_Clare]

@Hail_Ants

For the same reason that Catholics have so many kids. And muslims (via multiple wives) etc. Simply because the best way to ensure a religion’s survival and dominance in a society is to do *everything *possible to make it (and keep it) the majority of the population. Really that simple.

The whole ‘birth-control, divorce, abortion etc, is evil’ stuff is all after-the-fact…

1. Catholics don’t really have that many kids, anymore. In the United States Catholic fertility is on par with Protestant, and well below Mormon. Latin American fertility is cratering, and by mid-century Brazil is going to have an older population on average than the United States. Muslims tend to have more, but many Muslim countries (including Iran) have at or below replacement fertility right now- high fertility rates are mostly a feature of Sub-Saharan Africa and the more backward parts of the Muslim world like Yemen. For that matter backward Hindu parts of india (i.e. the north-centre) tend to have high fertility too.

2. Quite a lot of the early Christians didn’t think much of high fertility rates- Tertullian, for one, though the Mediterranean world was overpopulated- and generally they esteemed celibacy much higher than procreative marriage. The prohibition on abortion- which is as old as Christianity, really- was on the grounds that it was homicide, not on the grounds that it was nonprocreative.

3. Mormons are really an outlier among developed countries (although less so than, say, ultra-orthodox Jews). Their fertility rates are around 3, compared with around 2 for mainline Protestants and Catholics and 2.4 or so for evangelicals.

[dougie_monty]

@Hector_St_Clare

1. […]
   Latin American fertility is cratering[…]

Cratering?

[Leo_Bloom]

@PublicBlast

]Adam Ant was right in a way, Sue Duhnym. (Another great name! I feel left out–only 4 people in the world understand my SDMB name.) Anyway, to present an edited version of a joke I heard once:

A Mormon person and a Catholic priest are on a train.

Priest: I’m curious–have you ever tried alcohol?
Mormon: Yes, once, in my youth. Those were crazy times.
(pause) I’m curious: have you ever had intimate relations with a person?
Priest: Yes, before I became a man of the cloth.
Mormon: (grinning) Better than booze, eh?

I always heard/told with Rabbi and pork.

[Hector_St_Clare]

@dougie_monty

Cratering?

I don’t know, what would you call it?

Mexican fertility has declined from 7.2 children per woman to 2.3 in the last fifty years, and they aren’t really unusual in the region. El Salvador (the country with the exception less abortion ban) has below replacement fertility now. So does Nicaragua. And Chile. And Brazil. And Paraguay. (According to the CIA, at least, alternative estimates are slightly higher but not much).

For that matter , among American sub national entities, Puerto Rico currently has a lower fertility rate than any U.S. State.