Women gained financial freedom and the ability to choose when they get pregnant. Societies will now find out the market price for birthing children (as well as women finding out the price for not birthing children).
Women basically saying in order for me to risk what I have to risk to have a child(ren), I need <x> security first. Which can manifest as working to save and achieve higher income levels instead of having kids.
But I suppose there could be a huge environmental or whatever biological factor causing reduced pregnancies. Marriage rates might help tease this out.
Edit: from 2019
https://www.straitstimes.com/asia/east-asia/til-death-do-i-s...
> A decade ago, almost 47 per cent of single and never-married Korean women said they thought marriage was necessary.
>Last year, that fell to 22.4 per cent, while the number of couples getting hitched slumped to 257,600 - down from 434,900 in 1996.
One can also frame it as society’s fault for not providing both women and men with sufficient incentive to procreate. Note that the word “fault” typically has a negative connotation, but I am not intending to use it with positive or negative connotation, but simply as a causative factor.
The comment I replied to stated something changed, to which I wanted to clarify what I think the biggest variable that changed. Of course, men also may not want to have as many kids as in previous years, but I would still bet this is a much smaller factor than women saying no.
You could shelve that as "society not providing enough incentives", but to me it looks like a more complex issue than what's covered by carrot/stick mechanisms.
Not all issues leading to forgoing procreating are that complex, but putting any of them as "women chose to xxxx" is I think only useful at a micro level, and kinda misses the reasons why they chose to do so, which are usually not in any individual's hand.
Would you see a reward system counteract a psychological perception of their current situation ?
Now that women have freedom, society is imploding in a way, at least in terms of population.
So to get back to replacement levels of fertility, we either need to 1) turn women into slaves again, or 2) look at some other way of running the society. #1 doesn't sound very good if you value human rights.
It’s not an issue of financial struggle since the trend is most pronounced in wealthy countries, especially in those with small wealth divisions.