A strange Twitter exchange last week launched a conversation about the relationship between celibate vowed religious and pro-natalism.
In the recent HuffPost essay "Behold, the Millennial Nuns," Eve Fairbanks chronicled the rising number of millennial women discerning vocations to the religious life—a trend that many Catholics find encouraging. But Lyman Stone, research fellow at the Institute for Family Studies, seemed less than happy about this, tweeting: "It's worth mentioning that not all forms of religiosity are pro-natal and that if there were in fact a wave of vows-taking among religious women the effect on birth rates would be massively negative." His position seems to be that nuns are bad because they do not reproduce.
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