[munificent]

I'm always surprised this topic comes up all the time and there's all sorts of navel gazing about economics and housing and other reasons people want to have fewer kids. It seems to me that the simplest and most likely explanation is:

Having kids was never a primary motivation. Having sex was. Kids were just a hard-to-avoid downstream consequence of that. Once you have the pill, which makes it much easier to have sex without creating kids (and in particular, which allows women to avoid having kids even when they are raped), then the natural result is that there are a lot fewer babies popping out.

Because for the majority of sex acts, babies were never the goal in the first place.

[Ampersander]

I don't think the data support the conclusion that contraceptives are the main driver behind the decline in fertility. Contraceptives have been available for a long time and fertility is continually decreasing even when nothing changes in the availability of contraceptives.

Also, data going further back show that fertility has been declining since before contraceptives were widely available. Sweden for example: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1033535/fertility-rate-s...

[bombcar]

It seems a natural consequence of the pill is going to be that in a few generations, most of the people will be of the kind for whom babies are a goal if not the main goal.

Thinking of the Amish, or Orthodox Jews, or Trad Caths, Quiverfulls, etc. If they're averaging 4+ and everyone else is down below 1, how quickly does the world turn over?

[globular-toast]

Yeah. I think there's a couple of reasons why people think this way:

1. There is still shame associated with wanting sex. We're not ashamed of wanting food or sleep, but sex, oh no,

2. People change after having children and it's permanent. They forget what they were like before. It's kinda like taking LSD or something. These things can fundamentally change you as a person.

[Ekaros]

There is abortion option. And adoption. But to me it has always sounded like that most make it work somehow. So once there is a kid economics can in many cases workout somehow. Maybe not optimally but somehow. With even more kids later.

[ilovecake1984]

This. Which is why evolution will work very rapidly to correct the blip.