"Maybe what ails us is not our freedom per se, but something we mistake for freedom—being detached from family obligations, which are actually the demands that save us from egoism and despair."

Writes Catherine Pakaluk, author of book titled "Hannah’s Children," a book published by Regnery, "a publishing house known for its rightward bent."

The quote appears in the New Yorker article, a magazine publisher known for it's leftish bent, in an article titled "The Case for Having Lots of Kids/In 'Hannah’s Children,' an economist and mother of eight interviews highly educated women with large families—and examines the reasons for America’s declining fertility rate."

As Pakaluk writes, “My subjects described their choice to have many children as a deliberate rejection of an autonomous, customized, self-regarding lifestyle in favor of a way of life intentionally limited by the demands of motherhood.”

Some readers might find Pakaluk and her subjects overly judgmental toward other women. Pakaluk explains that this isn’t her intention. “My full and real view is that women with much smaller families or no children at all may share the purposes, values, and virtues of the women I interviewed, even though life did not hand them the same opportunities,” she writes.... This is a group that the cat-lady discourse seems to miss: women who don’t have the families they dream of, whether because of infertility or financial struggles or because they haven’t found the right partner....

Pakaluk clearly thinks that, as a culture, it is good to encourage young women to have families. The problem is how.... Her suggestion? Religion.... Her subjects describe their trust in God as one of their primary motivations for having a kid, and then another and another....