Hi all!

Given Latter-day Saints’ penchant for baby-making, accounting, and genealogy, you’d expect that there would be excellent current research about Latter-day Saint fertility. But you would be wrong.

It’s honestly kinda shocking. It’s clearly something people are interested in. The New York Times, the Salt Lake Tribune, and The Atlantic have all published articles in the last three months about the declining fertility rate among the Latter-day Saints! However, none of them reported on the total fertility rate of Latter-day Saints, which felt like a glaring omission to me.

Over at substack I try to:

1. Lay out my best estimate of the Latter-day Saint-specific current total fertility rate

2. Review historical rates of Latter-day Saint fertility

3. Investigate why LDS fertility was so high in my parents’ generation (the Boomers)

4. Briefly anaswer why it is declining today

Would of course be interested in your thought.

Here's the link: https://pywils.substack.com/p/the-baby-making-habits-of-the-latter