I’ll get right to the point. Leigh Snead’s new book Infertile but Fruitful is one of the finest personal testimonies I’ve read in the past decade. It’s a “simple” story in the best sense: concise, intimate, utterly frank, and memorable. It spoke, directly and beautifully, to my own family, as it will to many others. I’ll come back to it in a moment. But first, some useful background.
In a general sense, a culture’s fertility rate hints at its character. It also suggests its health. Bearing and raising children is serious business. It demands sacrifices. But for anyone with a generous spirit, it also creates love and hope, and trust in a meaningful future, because the instinct to “be fruitful and multiply” (Genesis 1:28, 9:1) is hardwired into the human species.
Rejecting that has consequences. And here’s an example. The minimum replacement rate for a population is 2.1 children per woman per lifetime. The total fertility rate across Western Europe was around 2.66 in the early 1960s. It had fallen to 1.46 in the late 1990s. It continued dropping to a historic low of 1.34 by 2024. That’s a fertility decline of 50 percent in barely two generations. Muslim Europeans tend to have somewhat higher fertility on average, but the broader story is nonetheless a massive, sustained collapse in childbearing across the continent.
As for the United States: In the early 1960s, its fertility rate was around 3.5, sharply higher than Europe’s at the time, because the American postwar Baby Boom was larger and lasted longer. But the subsequent drop off was steeper. The U.S. total fertility rate shrank to 1.59 by 2024. Thus, the net fertility decline over the past six or so decades is actually larger for the United States than Europe in absolute terms.
Why the collapse? The factors are fairly obvious: easy access to contraception and abortion; more women in higher education and the workforce; the rising costs of living; a consumption-driven economy; and the decline of religious belief.
Christianity strongly encouraged permanent marriages and large families. As Europe secularized, that moral pressure disappeared. Today, most children grow up seeing small families as normal. Their own fertility adjusts downward accordingly. What makes this reality so hard to reverse is that a modernity rooted in the sovereign self and its material appetites has taught so many of us to value these features.
The end result is a culture’s loss of meaning, an aging population with escalating health care costs, supported by a shrinking workforce. The necessary economic response to demographic decline is immigration, filling the labor gap with working-age people from higher-fertility regions. But the kind of mass immigration needed to compensate for low fertility typically sparks a bitter political backlash. This creates constant friction between economic need and grassroots popular anxiety that has impacted the life of nearly every Western nation.
So much for all the social data. How does any of it relate to Infertile but Fruitful?
One of the (wonderfully) ironic responses to all of the above is the number of women today, many of them religious believers, who deliberately choose to have large families. Again, fertility – the yearning to be part of bringing new life into the world – is inherent to being human. That can mean children, or a celibate life of service to others.
But everyone, without exception, has the need to be fruitful, and ignoring that need deforms the heart. Our own daughter is the mother of seven. For my wife Suann, some of the hardest years in our marriage were those early eight or ten when she was unable to conceive or had multiple miscarriages; this, while friends all around her birthed child after child.
Husbands can provide love and support. But they can never fully understand the suffering and sense of loss felt at a cellular level by the woman longing to bear a child, but can’t. Especially when the inability to conceive proves to be permanent.
Which brings us back to Leigh Snead’s movingly beautiful book. Snead writes without pretense or faux piety. Her style is simple, intimate, and direct, and all the more effective because of it. Infertile but Fruitful: Finding Fulfillment When You Can’t Conceive is a kind of confession. It’s the chronicle of a gifted woman who assumes that having a child will be easy, but instead grows – year after year, failure after failure – more committed to her marriage and her faith, precisely because of what she wants, but can never seem to have.
Over the years, Snead and her husband try everything to conceive, from NFP to professional medical assistance. Much of the latter, they discover, is morally unacceptable – IVF – and thus can’t be pursued. But even licit medical help turns out to be fruitless.
Worse, no clear biological reason for the problem can be found. As a result, one of the strengths of the author’s story is the very practical “lessons learned” section by which she ends each chapter; simply put, the things experience has taught her, and the counsel she offers to other women walking the same difficult, uncertain “way of the Cross.”
She writes that,
[As] the idea that I really might not ever get pregnant took hold in my imagination, the cross of infertility stood in sharp relief to the story I had been telling myself about how my life, about how my motherhood, would look. Infertility was my cross. And with the same fervor with which I had been praying to God to give me a baby, I somehow found the gift of extraordinary grace, and I picked it up. . .and our whole lives became more fully centered on Christ rather than on pregnancy.
We too easily forget that God never abandons the faithful soul. Today Snead is very much a mother; the mother of four treasured sons, all adopted and two with special needs. So the lesson in the author’s tale is simply this: Fertility is of the spirit even more than of the flesh. It’s the willingness and the courage to love.
