Those definitely affect the choice, but ultimately, there’s just no real cultural push to have more kids nowadays. Rich people aren’t having kids either, as you can see in top 10%, 1% brackets. Like, I don’t have a single girl friend that even wants 3 kids. Anyone whom I’ve talked to always has a range between 0-2. Can’t blame them. Giving up at the minimum 6 years of your life for no real benefits kinda sucks.
It's a complex issue. IMHO it's only a real problem when birth rates are consistently below replacement or when they fall way below replacement as they are in a few places like Korea.
In that case, step one is to remove obvious barriers like insane housing prices and pervasive workaholism so that people who want to have kids find it easy to do so. Create a culture that is a supportive environment for families.
I don't see the Project 2025 crowd doing much of that. Many of the billionaires backing the project are pushing work cultures and social policies that will have the opposite effect. Think Musk's "hard core" work cultures are conductive to family formation?
I think it's because their real goal is fundamentalist theocracy and/or fascism. Just like the climate protestors who are actually hard-core Marxists or anti-industrial Neo-primitivists hoping to collapse society to realize their vision, these people are "problemists." The problem is a good thing because it's a hook they can use to sell a whole agenda. Solving the problem without implementing that whole agenda would be, to them, a failure.
Christian Nationalists don't want to fix declining birth rates without implementing Christian Nationalism any more than the people throwing paint on works of art in Europe want greenhouse gas emissions fixed without collapsing capitalism.
