The shape of high fertility in a traditional Mennonite population

Abstract

Background: The Wenger Mennonites, a traditional horse-and-buggy group, are one of at least 30 embedded Anabaptist religious groups in the USA.

Aim: This first study of Wenger fertility documents, explains, and compares Wenger fertility to three other Anabaptist groups: the Amish, the Hutterites, and the Old Colony Mennonites.

Subjects and methods: The 1997 Wenger church directory provides household and fertility data for 14 530 individuals. This directory was transformed into an SPSS database so that age-specific birth rates could be analysed.

Results: From 1966 to 1996, total fertility ranged from 10.68 to 8.31 for married women, and age-specific fertility rates for 20–24-year-old women never dropped below 0.500. For similar time periods, no higher rates were found in any of the comparison groups. Even so, fertility has dropped over 22% in the last 30 years, suggesting increasing regulation of fertility.

Conclusion: Wenger fertility has been very high, at least since the 1960s, and continues to be higher than the comparison groups, even though there is some evidence of fertility decline, especially in older women. This high fertility is powered by high economic and social capital, and a farming community with a strong pro-natalist ideology.

• Age-specific fertility
• Amish
• birth intervals
• Hutterites
• Mennonites
• natural fertility
• parity
• social capital
• total fertility
• fertility regulation

Notes

Notes

1.  Out of 2221 first births recorded in the whole directory, only 18 of these were to women under 20 years old (0.9%).

2.  The Old Colony Mennonites of Dutch–Russian origin have colonies in Canada, Mexico, Paraguay, and Bolivia.

3.  Stillbirths were excluded from this analysis. All premarital conceptions listed were to women who eventually married a church member, or who later joined the church. It is unknown how many other women had premarital conceptions, but did not join the church, or left the church, before 1997.

4.  Of 13 114 total births in the data, 130 were twins, for a twinning rate of 0.99%.

5.  The sample included all Wenger children under 15 living in the Martindale church district in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, in 1968. Although many of these had migrated to other states, 55 out of the 78 men in the sample were farming in 1998.

6.  This information comes from interviews in June 2005 with two midwives who have Wenger clients.