Mario Renzi's Ideal Family Size

Can religion have an impact on how big a family size is? According to Mario Renzi’s article Ideal Family Size is an Intervening Variable between Religion and Attitudes towards Abortion, “The control variables of age, income, education, and size of birthplace were not as important as religion in explaining the variation in abortion attitudes.” With that being said, people from a Catholic background are most likely to keep a child due to a religious reasoning versus a non-catholic person, “religious affiliation, particularly Catholic vs. non-Catholic, as well as frequency of church attendance were the most powerful predictors of attitudes towards abortion.” His findings towards attitudes abortion because of religion helped support our hypothesis that those who come from a religious background, mainly focusing on Catholicism, Christianity, and Judaism, will have more children than those who don’t

Religion has built empires and has torn them down. Religion is everywhere and apart of our everyday life. With so many religions in our society it seems like those who are more religious than others tend to have more children than those who aren’t. Our literature review also states that “ As early as 1960, it was found that Catholic married women wanted and expected to have a larger number of children than non-Catholic married women (Whelpton et al. 1966: 90).” Religion seems to be the main reason on couples deciding to have children.
We also looked at if education played a key role in determining family size from Protestant, Catholicism and Judaism. According to Joe L. Spath from the National Opinion Research Center, he states his finding in his article “ In the first three years after college graduation, graduates of Catholic colleges have more children than other Catholics, who in turn tend to have more children than Protestant, jews, or agnostics.” Supporting our research for Religion versus number of