Anna Karenina: Marriage, Love, and Children

What am I reading this week? Of course, the great novel by Leo Tolstoy. How do I relate it to the data collected about Catholic women that I wrote about two weeks ago? Marriage, Love, and Children, three topics I did not cover then.

The 96-page study published by the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate that was extensively reported in America raises some intriguing questions that were not fully explored in the magazine. For example, what is the result of the following pattern? “Sixty-three percent of Catholic women in our survey are married (46 percent to a Catholic spouse and 17 percent to a non-Catholic spouse). Six percent are widowed. One in 10 is separated or divorced. Six percent live with a partner. Fifteen percent have never married.” Many of the women who left the church or felt uncomfortable there did not fall into the 46% of those married to a Catholic spouse. A few, however, came to the church because of a spouse. And the unmarried generally don’t think it’s important to marry Catholic. Typical American patterns affect the church.

There’s not much at all about Anna Karenina’s kind of wild, illegitimate love, but there is plenty about families and children. Remember, this is the book that begins: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Catholic families in this survey are happy families on the surface; little is revealed about what actually goes on.

The CARA study reveals a multi-generational Catholic world, which I would have thought had broken apart years ago. “The typical Catholic woman in the United States has had two children, and both of those children are Catholic. (Note: ‘Typical’ refers to the median observation.) Most often, they grew up in households where they had at least three brothers or sisters. Thus, their parents often had twice as many children as they have had.” Almost 60% of the respondents indicate that their brothers and sisters are Catholic today. Of those who have had children, 73 percent report that all of their children are Catholic now. Fifteen percent say none of their children are Catholic.

Today fewer than one in 10 Catholic women has had four children. Now, how did that happen? What question would you ask? This study asked only about one method of birth control. “Respondents who had ever married or who are living with a partner were asked, ‘Have you and a partner ever practiced Natural Family Planning or N.F.P., which Catholic marriage preparation programs often teach as a method of postponing pregnancy without the use of artificial contraception?’ Overall, 22 percent said ‘yes’ and 78 percent said ‘no.’” A third of women who attend Mass weekly have used N.F.P., while only 12 percent of those who attend less had. N.F.P was used more by Hispanic women than non. “Generationally, the oldest and youngest generations of Catholic women are the most likely to indicate that they had used N.F.P. … Vatican II Catholics (those born between 1943 and 1960) are the least likely to have used N.F.P. (18 percent).” I guess my generation rejected all that jazz after Humane Vitae.

The survey asked only these women why they used N.F.P. “The most common reasons cited were related to finances (38% “very important”), not wanting to have more children (34%), and their relationship with their husband (33%). Fewer indicated the following to be important: medical concerns (26%), time concerns (23%), or space concerns (20%).” So at least there was the opportunity to comment on why it was important to limit the size of their families – for the 22 percent of those who used N.F.P.

So what are the other 78% of partnered women using to avoid their mothers’ large families? Other forms of birth control, obviously. And abortions. Patrick Brown, in the next issue of America, uses data from the Guttmacher Institute to issue a call to arms to pro-life campaigners in the church. He finds it deplorable that 24% of those who procure abortions are Catholic, about the same as their percentage in the US population, 22%. In contrast, only 13% of Evangelical women abort, though they comprise 27% of US women, “revealing a greater reluctance toward choosing abortion, a greater reluctance toward revealing their religion on a survey or both.” This article is a good dose of reality for America because the survey that did not ask the majority of women who do not use N.F.P. these important questions. Of course, this article is one man’s opinion – not a survey of women.

Brown uses earlier studies to search for the “face” of the women seeking abortions. He continues, “This data suggests that the face of a Catholic woman choosing abortion is often not a scared college student or a single woman trying to reach career aspirations but instead a stretched-thin married mother with children at home. Her challenges require us to recognize that pro-life outreach should not just focus on college campuses or inner-city clinics but on middle-class suburban parishes as well.” He extrapolates from the studies that the Catholic woman tends to be older (over 30), married, at home, a mother, and white or Hispanic. He concludes, “We should consider what complex forces might drive a married Catholic woman to obtain an abortion—perhaps financial constraints, fear of neglecting other children or their careers or avoiding the social stigma of having ‘too many’ children.” Nobody in the survey mentioned that kind of social pressure; is it invented?

I confess that I am using Anna Karenina as a frame to get you to read more of the statistics from the survey. As I read the novel, I keep thinking about agency: who acts and who reacts? I want to understand how the Catholic women in the survey act and react in their lives. The data give us some clues.