If you want a large family, this type of woman is your best bet

Using the General Social Survey (GSS) data, I looked to see which factors best predict that a woman will decide to have a large family.

I thought women from the South would have more kids, but they didn't differ from Northerners, and while conservative women have larger families, the impact is not large. IQ also predicts fewer children, but the effect is small.

I found that: 1) ideal family size, 2) church attendance, and 3) educational level, in particular, are the strongest predictors of the total number of offspring.

I'll present two women to illustrate.  The first woman says that seven children is the ideal family size. She attends church more than once a week, and she went no further than high school. The data predict that she will have 3.7 children.

The second woman says zero kids is the ideal size for a family.  She never goes to church, and she has 20 years of education.  The model based on the data predicts she will have .56 kids.  The first woman is predicted to have 6.6 more children than the second woman.

Again, the most powerful predictor by far is education.  It's even more predictive than what a woman says about ideal family size.

UPDATE:  Looking at older data, I found a predictor even more powerful than education: age at marriage.  Women who are younger when they get married have significantly more kids.