Never Just a Choice: Three Theoretical Approaches to Economic Constraints on Family Formation

This article attempts to understand how economic realities influence decisions around partnership commitment and raising children for US people, whether poor or well-off. Critical realist social theory, reproductive justice, and the Catholic documentary tradition on families all assist in understanding these realities and articulating solutions to the challenges they pose. While the three approaches share surprising common ground, none of the three succeeds in isolation at describing pursuit of the human good of family formation by persons who are themselves socially constituted, as are the options from which they choose. That each of these theoretical approaches recommends similar political responses to family formation serves to highlight critical distinctions between the affordances and drawbacks of each approach. Reading these traditions in concert reveals a discrepancy between the ways Catholic tradition understands economic constraints on family formation and the way present US church leadership responds to them.