Many Latter-day Saint couples once took their cues about how many babies to have from a pop-rock musical.

Believing it reflected church theology, they looked to the 1970s production “Saturday’s Warrior,” with its actors singing and dancing while delivering the message that heavenly spirits were waiting for earthly bodies — and any attempt to block them bordered on apostasy.

It had sprung up amid societal angst about too many children being born, overwhelming an already overworked globe. One song even challenged a contemporary movement known as “zero population growth.”

Though it actually wasn’t based on church teachings, by some estimates, “Saturday’s Warrior” was second only to apostle Bruce R. McConkie’s “Mormon Doctrine” in its influence among members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

There was no question that families within the faith were larger than the norm and often derided as being selfish, consuming too many of the world’s resources. Such families were sometimes harassed in public places as “menaces,” even asked rudely if they had heard of birth control.

Fast-forward 50 years, though, and society is singing a different tune. Now many scholars and political leaders on the left and the right acknowledge that the Western world needs more kids.

Ironically, Latter-day Saints aren’t likely to be society’s saviors.

While church members remain fertility overperformers, evidence suggests a falling birthrate similar to the one occurring throughout much of the country and indeed the world.

Data from the early 1980s shows Latter-day Saints averaged 1.5 more children than the rest of the United States. By 2020, that gap had slimmed to around 0.7.

[Read more: Understanding why LDS birthrates are dropping — and how the church might reverse the trend.]

“Utah’s rate has plummeted by more than 37%, the largest decline of any state in the country,” The New York Times reported. The Beehive State, which was “No. 1 in the nation for fertility rates for years, is now ranked sixth.”

What changed?

Birth control was ‘bad’

Even before the pill was introduced as an artificial contraceptive in the 1960s, Latter-day Saint leaders condemned efforts to limit the number of children as “sinful.”

In a 1971 General Conference address, senior apostle Spencer W. Kimball, an eventual church president, said “loud, blatant voices today shout ‘fewer children’ and offer the pill, drugs, surgery and even ugly abortion to accomplish that. Strange the proponents of depopulating the world seem never to have thought of continence!”

Throughout the decade and into the 1980s, leaders warned against birth control and church policy strongly discouraged it. In 1995, the church’s family proclamation declared that “God’s commandment for his children to multiply and replenish the earth remains in force.”

Three years later, though, the church revised its General Handbook policy on birth control to read: “The decision as to how many children to have and when to have them is extremely intimate and private and should be left between the couple and the Lord. Church members should not judge one another in this matter.”

The current handbook maintains that approach almost word for word, adding that “church members should not judge one another in this matter.”

The changed wording has opened the door to a lot of options for Latter-day Saint couples.

“The decision to postpone kids has kind of opened my eyes to other meanings of ‘multiplying and replenishing the earth’ as we often hear in the church referring to children,” writes Elise Forbes Wallace, a 26-year-old in Orem. “My husband, Bennett, and I have been able to build and create in so many other ways during our season before having kids.”

The couple have been married for almost three years, which isn’t long, she writes in a message, “but that feels long for the Utah area/culture we live in.”

Elise does want to have children, she writes, “two or maybe three” but “will play it by ear when I get there.”

“I’ve never really wanted a huge family,” she says. “I am one of two kids and really loved it.”

Jason and Shelby Broadbent waited four years to have a child. Their son, Wells, was born in May.

The 25-year-olds have known each other since elementary school in Cache County and have been in a relationship since high school. They both served church missions — he went to California, she to Peru — and married within a year of their return. They then both finished college at Utah State University, moved to downtown Salt Lake City and started working.

“We wanted to get through school, pay for our education, and be more comfortable financially,” Jason says, “before having a kid.”

Shelby, who plans to be a stay-at-home mom, adds: “It was also important to have some time just us two together.”

The timing, they both say, was “a personal decision.” They felt no pressure from family members or the church.

Accruing ‘celestial points’

This marked a seismic shift for many inside the Utah-based faith.

Writer Mette Marie Ivie was one of 11 children in her Latter-day Saint family being raised in New Jersey in the ’70s.

“My parents were in a bizarre competition with another family in the ward [congregation] in the area — plus they thought birth control was bad,” Ivie recalls. “It felt from my kid perspective that they wanted ‘blessings’ from God,” she says, “and that they were collecting some kind of celestial points for each descendant who remained faithful in the church.”

Ivie had six children of her own, the youngest of whom, Mercy, died at birth.

She didn’t feel pressured by the church on the number of offspring but — not unlike the message of “Saturday’s Warrior” — Ivie had a specific child-by-child sense of “there is another child for you.”

That often came with what she thought at the time “were specific hints or visions about the child to come, or a sense of being haunted with the idea that someone was missing.”

Sociologist Tim Heaton, a retired professor at church-owned Brigham Young University, says Ivie is hardly alone in sensing a decrease of pressure on parents to produce.

For some, larger families “were indicators of Mormon faithfulness,” he says, but that is “no longer part of the culture.”

Having four kids used to be fairly standard in many Latter-day Saint families, he says. Now three seems to be the new standard.

Lower, sure. But still enough outside the norm as to raise eyebrows in some parts.

One Latter-day Saint mom-to-be reports that when she informed her nonreligious boss in a prestigious college town that she was having a third child, the employer was startled and asked, “Have you always wanted a big family?”

‘Generalized anxiety’

As the church loosened its birth control stance and urged couples to make prayerful decisions about family size on their own, the number of children steadily dropped. That coincided with increasing economic demands that have made it nearly impossible for couples to survive on one income.

“I see generalized anxiety in my clients,” says Mosiah Gonzalez, who teaches family studies at Weber State University and has a private therapy practice. “With clients who are LDS, it’s always a factor. Older clients were much more willing to encourage younger people to have kids. Young couples are worried about how they are going to make it work. Providing for a family is a real and tangible concern.”

Some clients tell Gonzalez, he says, that they are trying to balance church messages with reality.

“They feel they would be betraying cultural history and family legacy if they don’t have as many as they think they should,” he says, but it is not easy.

Bountiful-based therapist Kayleen Davidson believes that today’s young Latter-day Saints live in a “sphere of uncertainty,” wondering where the world is headed.

They feel they need to “create more certainty in their lives,” Davidson says. “They want to be more established and have better careers to be more ready for kids.”

That usually means delaying pregnancy and limiting family size, she says, to “be prepared and able to provide for the kids.”

Another pressure on young Latter-day Saints, Davidson says, is the influence of social media, which suggests to them that they have to make their lives “look a certain way.”

It makes them more aware of what everyone else has and is doing, she says, and can leave them wanting to provide “better than their parents, to get ahead, to be established and have all that.”

Today’s economics “make it difficult for young couples,” Davidson says, “to live the way they used to in Utah.”

Sure, it’s an individual decision, the therapist says, but that can be immobilizing, too.

The Latino difference

Based on her research with Latter-day Saint Latinos in Arizona, California, Nevada and Utah, Brittany Romanello believes the birthrate in that culture has not declined as it has among white members.

“The average among the 69 women I interviewed between 2018 and 2021 was 3.7 children, which is high,” says Romanello, who is a sociocultural anthropologist at the University of Arkansas, “and it’s probably higher now because most of the women I talked to were under 35 and not through having children.”

These women believed that family is crucially important, but the message came not just for the church, she says, but also from their culture.

“There was never the idea with any of them that it would be OK to not have children, unless you had a medical reason,” Romanello reports. “Motherhood was seen as something that marks you as celestial and ready to work in the Kingdom of God.”

And they didn’t consider finances, she says, as a reason to limit their families.

Economic challenges “are very real for many of them, because they are facing multilevel discrimination based on race, gender, legal status, immigration status,” Romanello says. “That made having a larger family more difficult than perhaps the white American family with citizenship, but not one of the women I interviewed said ‘we’re not going to stop having children because of money.’”

Nor did they see having children in conflict with a career, she says. In the Latino tradition, women always worked and had children.

The interviewees told Romanello, “Well, I bring my baby with me, or I work out of the home. I might not have a degree, but I’m going to go sell food with my husband on the weekends, or get involved in Amway or doTERRA or Mary Kay, to supplement our income. Even though it is going to be hard, we know another baby’s waiting for us, so we’re going to do it anyway.”

It was just something they saw their mothers or their grandmothers do, she says, growing their families amid poverty, civil wars and political upheaval.

“Of course things are scary. Of course things are uncertain, but this is where you choose faith,” Romanello recalled the women saying. “This is where you rely on the resilience that is within your ancestry.”

Global perspective

What about Latter-day Saints outside the United States? Have their family sizes shrunk?

Yes, says researcher Caroline Kline, assistant director for Global Mormon Studies at Southern California’s Claremont Graduate University, who conducted interviews with Latter-day Saint women in several countries.

“While it was not uncommon for the oldest narrators to have very large families, there’s been a significant decline in family size in the following generations,” Kline reports. “In my sample, nine out of the 11 narrators from Nicaragua who were born in the 1970s or later had two or fewer children.”

Like their U.S. counterparts, these women face financial stress.

Choices to have smaller families “are often due to the economic hardship the narrators experienced during their own childhoods (usually in large families),” Kline writes in an email, “or the economic hardship which was occurring during their own child-rearing years.”

One 49-year-old Nicaraguan said she had her two children almost 11 years apart in an effort to balance work and child-rearing.

The woman told Kline that she didn’t want her children “to suffer what I suffered, the poverty I suffered.”

The church emphasis on a single provider — the man — no longer works for many families, she writes, including Latter-day Saints in foreign countries.

A 36-year-old mother of three from Kenya explained to Kline that she “needed to work alongside her husband because the burden of providing is too much for one person.”

While some women from Africa would be stay-at-home moms with larger families if it were financially possible, “it’s important to note that several also advocate for women to enter the workforce, for the sake of their own mental health, well-being, and independence,” Kline writes. “Various African narrators did not view being a stay-at-home mom as desirable.”

A Nicaraguan woman told her that she fled her home at age 15 “because her mother had so many children that she became depressed and exhausted from being forced to raise them all,” Kline writes. She eventually had three children.

A South African Latter-day Saint mentioned the exhaustion of taking care of households — cooking, cleaning, even working — while “men weren’t stepping up financially or in terms of domestic labor,” she writes. That woman “chose to have three children.”

A final factor in Kline’s interviews: ambition to be like Americans.

“Many members in the Global South are striving to be upwardly mobile, and for some this means creating lives and families that are more stable than the ones in which they grew up,” Kline writes. “That desire for stability often outweighs the church’s pro-natalist messaging and local cultural preferences for larger families.”

Societal hand-wringing

In 2023, senior apostle Dallin H. Oaks, who would become church president, advised young single adult Latter-day Saints to marry earlier and not delay having children — even while acknowledging the financial obstacles.

“Our concern includes the causes, such as the shortage of homes young marrieds can afford to buy and the growing amounts of student debt,” said Oaks, still recommending that such families go “forward with faith, and do the best you can in housing market circumstances less favorable than I and your grandparents encountered in our early years.”

A couple of years later, in his first General Conference sermon after the death of his predecessor, Russell M. Nelson, Oaks spoke again about the importance of families and concern for limiting the number of children.

“The marriages and birthrates of our church members are much more positive, but they have also declined significantly,” he told the faithful. “It is vital that Latter-day Saints do not lose their understanding of the purpose of marriage and the value of children.”

Oaks continued, “The national declines in marriage and childbearing are understandable for historic reasons, but Latter-day Saint values and practices should improve — not follow — those trends.”

Some are, in fact, bucking the trend — but in their own way.

“At this point in my life, I take the church’s view of children into account, but my decisions are based on what I’ve seen in my own life through friends and family with their own family dynamics,” says 23-year-old Rachel Rivers Wetzel. “From the church, I feel pressure to get started without financial preparedness and I dislike that messaging. Birthrate or not, it’s important to bring children into a life of stability. I think my generation really cares about this.”

As for her own life, says Wetzel, “I want four to six children if my health and finances allow.”

She knows that’s unusual among her peers but is confident she has “the energy and heart to raise a lot of people.”

The church and society may be banking on more like her.