Getting pregnant is hard

Seeing that there are 8 billion people in the world makes you think that the process of creation might be easy. It isn’t.
Females are born with all the eggs they will ever have.
And there is exactly one (yes, one!) chance of conception every month.
There is a reason why there is a billion-dollar industry that helps females track pregnancy cycles.
And “how to get pregnant” is a popular search query.

Staying pregnant is hard

About 33% pregnancies fail.

Even the doctor wife of a multi-billionaire suffered three unfortunate miscarriages.

Anecdotally, I don’t even know 10 people who have ended up in a severe accident. However, I can count 10+ stories of miscarriages in my immediate circle. Right from early miscarriages to fetal abnormalities that lead to forced abortions. These stories are all too common.

Successful pregnancy is just the beginning

A newborn baby needs continuous monitoring, 6-10 feeds, and 4-8 diaper changes. Well, once they start moving, they can injure themselves, sometimes fatally. All in all, it is about 10-14 years of commitment before a child can be left alone for extended periods. All of this is a time commitment. The time that could have been instead spent sifting through email in email mines.

Pregnancy risk is asymmetric

Being a male was physically dangerous only till 100 years ago. A male would end up in fights. A male can be forcefully conscripted in a war to fight for a king he has never seen to attack other males he doesn’t care about. The farm and industry jobs were no less dangerous. Losing a limb or two was part of life. In such circumstances, for a female, the idea of being pregnant wasn’t that unattractive.

A male today in advanced countries might spend his entire life without being in a single fistfight. The pregnancy remains a fairly involved process.

It isn’t surprising that war-prone areas ranging from Israel to Sudan have high fertility rates.

Timescales have shifted except for pregnancy

when the easy gets easier, the hard gets harder

100 years back, 10-60 days shipping voyages were common and risky. Postal deliveries took multiple days.

Now, we live in the age of instant connections. Instant food. And instant entertainment. The time it takes for pregnancy and child raising has still remained the same.

Pregnancy has no rewards for professional parents

For an Amish working in a farm, a 10-year-old child is an extra pair of hands.

A professional has little upside of having a child in the short-term.

For a Software Engineer at Google or a trader at Goldman Sachs, even an 18-year-old Stanford-enrolled child is a money sink.

Globalization reduces the need for pregnancy

In a tribal world, pregnancy was the only way to sustain one’s tribe. And that’s why humans have such elaborate customs around celebrating pregnancy and childbirth.

In a globalized world, one can easily borrow workers from another tribe.

Consider Japan as an example. Even if the Japanese workforce is shrinking, the Mexican workers in Toyota factories are churning out cars for American customers as well as the dividends for Japanese shareholders.

This would have been unfathomable till ~1500 A.D. And even after that, this was a fairly unreliable approach to prosperity till the Second World War brought the requisite peace.

The fall in birth rates

Given all of the above logical arguments, the precipitous fall in birth rates, even in middle incomes countries like Mexico and Turkey is not surprising.