Once the World’s Fastest-Growing People | How Hutterites Are Still Standing

In 1953, two researchers asked a plain question: if nobody stops them, how many children can human beings have? The answer they wrote down was my people. Hutterite mothers averaged about ten children, and demographers still measure fertility against the married Hutterite women of the 1920s. Today the best estimates say about five. Half, in two generations. I'm Andreas Wurz, a Hutterite. I keep the books on a colony of 150 people in southern Alberta. These are the numbers, including a study of my own branch, and the reason almost nobody on a colony says out loud.