But why are we under the replacement rate? Seems relevant

It all comes back to women being treated as full people. Having a child is dangerous, expensive, and a major time commitment which mean that women who have other options are going to have fewer children later in life when they have the resources to support them. We also have much less demand for unskilled workers so even women who really want children are getting educated and establishing careers first rather than getting married at 18.

https://publichealth.jhu.edu/2026/is-the-us-birth-rate-decli...

That leaves really only two choices: pull a Ceaușescu and try to remove the choice, or improve all of the things which make people feel now is not the right time to have kids. Since the former choice is both immoral and self-defeating, that really flips the discussion to why the people who claim to want more children oppose universal healthcare, childcare, making housing more affordable, banning negative career impacts for mothers, addressing climate change, etc. There are many things which factor into an expensive multi-decade bet and you have to improve all of them to substantially shift the outcome.

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cogman10 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Because of eroding worker rights and raise cost of living.

You need free time for kids and if the salaries are too low for a single income household a lot of people will end up opting out of having kids.

This isn't unique the the US. Basically every country with a whack work life balance is looking at population replacement problems.

	▲	twodave an hour ago \| parent [-]
		I think this is an oversimplification. History has shown that as soon as a country is developed enough that children start increasing the family expenses rather than decrease them (I.e. helping out with the farm, or whatever the sustaining family business is, but in developing countries this is overwhelmingly agriculture) the pressure to have children slacks off to a large degree and becomes more of a luxury. So it’s just a byproduct of industrialization. The US is actually better off with replacement rate than a lot of countries that have industrialized since them because of the way it happened and the wars that were fought. More rapidly-industrializing countries (China, Japan, a few other Asian and SA countries) have way shorter runways despite industrializing much later than the US. And those with one child policies really just made things worse for themselves. A very large part of what the future is going to look like in my opinion is how different countries are able to grapple with this issue and come up with solutions to the problem of a large aging population and a service, hospitality and medical industry with not enough bodies.