[stackskipton]

There is also #4, there is plenty of women who don't want kids. Women having kids was not option until advent of modern birth control unless they were totally celibate.

My wife has zero interest in having kids but enjoys being married, if this were 100 years ago, she likely would have kids by now.

[BobaFloutist]

This is almost 100% the answer, despite it pissing literally everyone off. I really feel like the only long term solution is getting artificial wombs figured out. Last I checked, we're closer than I thought, but people are still hung up on all the ethical questions that will probably evaporate when we realize it's the only way people are largely going to have kids at all.

[missedthecue]

There is currently no scientific effort to develop an artificial womb anywhere on earth. There are several well funded efforts to get the age at which premature babies can be expected to reliably survive down to 20-21 weeks. But that's not the same thing.

If you've ever seen pharmaceutical ads, they almost always advise against taking the medication while pregnant, or to advise your physician. It's because so much of human gestation is still a black box. We do not understand how it works, only that chemicals and medication can seriously disrupt it in ways we cannot yet grasp. There is so much inter-cerebral and hormonal communication between mother and fetus that is yet to be discovered and understood, and a lot of that will depend on mapping out general cerebral mechanics, something we also haven't yet done.

People act like artificial wombs are 10-20 years away, but we are so far away we don't even have a roadmap. We don't even have an understanding of all the things we need to understand. We are in a pre-renaissance of sorts, and artificial wombs are inter-galactic space travel.