Fertility Patterns and Trends Among the Old Order Amish

Abstract

Summary Using statistics from an Amish census, a survey of couples, and a family genealogy, we examine trends in Old Order Amish fertility during this century. We also examine factors which might explain variations in fertility. We find that Amish fertility has remained high and that there is no evidence of a downward trend. Comparisons with Hutterite fertility show that while marital fertility rates are similar for young women, the rates for older Amish women are much lower than those for older Hutterite women. We find some limited evidence of fertility control among women of high parity and among non-farm wives, but most variation in individual fertility is due to physiological factors, some of which appear to be passed from one generation to the next. We find that the main form of population control among the Old Order Amish is apostasy, and that rates of apostasy have been rising. Finally, we examine the family backgrounds of the leavers.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 63 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.