Amish More Fecund than Hasidic Jews

An article from the Associated Press describes Hasidic Jews in Brooklyn giving a group of Lancaster County Amish a walking tour of their neighborhood.

'It's reinforcing to the Amish community to see us Jews living the way the Bible says Jews are supposed to live, and have lived since the time of Moses and Abraham,' said Yisroel Ber Kaplan, program director for the Chassidic Discovery Center in Brooklyn. 'The Amish are also living their lives as the Bible speaks to them.'

Well, maybe. But the Amish seemed a little less impressed:

[Amishman] John Lapp and his wife, Priscilla, brought their three children on the tour. John Lapp said the ties to the communities might be more surface than substance.

"In some things we are alike, like our clothing and our traditional beliefs," he said. Priscilla Lapp added, "And in some things we are not. The biggest thing is that Jesus is our savior."

The article led me to wonder which group is winning the demographic arms race. A study from 2000, reported on here found that Hasidic Jews average 6.72 children per woman. The Amish are usually said to average around 7 children per woman, but these estimates are several decades old. More recent studies that have looked at fertility among the Amish in Elkhart-LaGrange counties in Indiana found an average of about 5 children per woman. However, these studies only looked at present fertility, not completed fertility, and thus underestimate the total number of children an Amish woman can be expected to bear during her lifetime.

Not having anything better to do with my afternoon (I work for a non-profit) I decided to pour over Lancaster County obituaries for recently deceased Amishmen to see if I could get my own estimate on fertility. I first looked at 16 obituaries for Amishmen aged 85 to nearly 100 who died in the past two years. Because the obituaries list the number of children and grandchildren, it was possible to estimate the completed fertility for each dead Amish person's children, all of whom would be aged 45 - 69, give or take a few years, and 90 percent of whom could be expected to be Amish themselves given retention rates. I then supplemented these estimates by looking at 9 obituaries for Amishmen aged 45 - 69 who had died in the previous two years.

There were a total of 137 "Amishmen" in the 45 - 69 cohort (128 of whom were the children of deceased Amishmen referenced in their parent's obituary, and 9 of whom were deceased and had their own obituary). This group had a total of 971 children, as found by adding the number of the older cohort's grandchildren to the number of the younger cohort's children. When we divide 971 by 137, we find that the 45 - 69 Amish cohort averaged 7.08 children per woman. This probably underestimes Amish fertility slightly, since around 10 percent or so of these 137 "Amishmen" can be expected to have left the church. Still, it's close enough to warrant the statement that the typical Amish woman living in Lancaster County aged 45 - 69 has given birth to 7 children in her lifetime. This gives the Amish in Lancaster County a slightly higher total fertility rate than Hasidic Jews.

On the other hand, there are apparently around 470,000 Ultra-Orthodox Jews in the United states (see here), versus only 250,000 or so Amishmen, so I expect that the Ultra-Orthodox population will exceed the Amish population for the foreseeable future.