Is it not totally obvious that the low birth rate is directly caused by availability and social acceptance of contraceptives and related technologies?
People didn’t really “choose” to have that many kids in the past. It turns out that even if you don’t really want to have kids, not having sex is a very, very hard thing to do.
Nature’s solution to making humans have kids despite being able to reason themselves out of it is to make them incredibly horny compared to most other animals. Or, put another way, the less horny humans were filtered out along the way since they didn’t produce enough offspring and were outcompeted by the more horny.
I didn't have a sense that my grandmother's generation (and all children prior to that) were perceived by their parents as unwelcome consequences of their unrestrained hornyness.
Old literature starting with the bible is full of examples of people lamenting infertility, they clearly wanted kids.
Also, today the only people who have children are the religious, which are also people that have objectively got the greatest control and ability to restrain their sexuality, which kind of goes against what you're saying.
And finally, people forever back had ways to not get pregnant if they didn't want to.
You could give it a whirl I guess. The folks that I know who have many (5+) kids are religious jews, catholics, muslims and mormons. I don't know if all of these people have defered sex till marriage but they are certainly not the ones racking up tripple or even double digit bodycounts. Are you saying you have a line of reasoning that people who maintain religious adherence today are doing it so they can have unrestrained sex?
Catholicism has been in general against contraception.
Of course it's still used, but probably at lower rates.
Non protected sex leads to pregnancy at a much higher rate than protected one.
I expect it to be similar for other similar religions.
Bodycount is also irrelevant, the total numer of intercourses is what matters. I'm not sure if having a stable partner since a young age leads to more total intercourses than occasional partners, but I'd be lead to thing so.
I am not so sure. France experienced its decline in fertility about a century earlier than its neighbors (see figure 1 in [0] for instance). Did they have better contraceptives?
Traditionnal methods such as marrying late (see: European Marriage Pattern), pulling out, timing are very effective at _reducing_ the number of children you will have (note: not effective at reducing it to zero - don't do this at home kids!).
People didn’t really “choose” to have that many kids in the past. It turns out that even if you don’t really want to have kids, not having sex is a very, very hard thing to do.
Nature’s solution to making humans have kids despite being able to reason themselves out of it is to make them incredibly horny compared to most other animals. Or, put another way, the less horny humans were filtered out along the way since they didn’t produce enough offspring and were outcompeted by the more horny.