Feminism

To answer the implied question of the headline:

People aren't sure that raising children will be meaningful. They struggle to find purpose in their urn lives and so struggle to find a reason to create new lives.

And now my own thoughts:

Environmental and political doomerism no doubt plays a role. If you think it's all going to shit, why bring children into it who will no doubt suffer even worse?

Among those proposing solutions to reverse the trend, the conventional wisdom goes that if only the government were to offer more financial support to parents, birth rates would start ticking up again.

But what if that wisdom is wrong?

What if we made a better world for no good reason?

I am 51. Only two of my close friends ended up having a kid. One always wanted kids. The other's then boyfriend popped the rubber and she didn't want to have another abortion. That's three children combined out of a thirteen friends. The only two in less than ideal economic situations are the two that had kids.

Maybe some people don't want to have kids.

I think economic arguments are clearly wrong given that poorer people have more children, both across countries and within a country. However I'm not sure that a lack of meaning, as opposed to the availability of other sources of meaning, is the most likely alternative explanation. Women I know personally have either no children or one child as late as possible (late 30's or early 40's) despite having significantly more financial resources than the average American. These women have other things that they would rather do.

(Those other things are usually their careers, which they consider the core part of their identity. That makes me wonder whether the idle rich have more children than the professional class.)