realistically the solution is going to be artificial wombs, which are already being tested in Japan and the US. They'll get them in the door initially for women who can't have kids naturally or homosexual couples, but eventually it will be normalized or governments will just create as many test tube kids as needed

only other alternative is a massive propaganda campaign to raise the social value of being a mother to how it used to be, where motherhood was socially seen as being far higher status than having a job for women. That's the current problem, years of women being told that "freedom" and having a job is way better than having kids. It's really not a money/stability issue, because the poorest people in Western countries have the most kids

However in many ways freedom and having a job is better than having kids, we can't really propagandize that away. What we need to do is make child birth compatible with freedom and having a job. For example free child care provision, social expectation on fathers to take a greater role in child care, less wealth inequality so that working provides more free time.

Artificial wombs are straight out of Huxley's 'Brave New World' - scary how prescient that work is.

While women are absolutely disproportionally affected by a couple having children, in general raising a family needs to be made such that it isn’t so disruptive to… well, basically everything. In today’s economy once a couple has even one kid, many sacrifices must be made by both parents, even for the relatively privileged in the working middle class.

Not only are the financial and opportunity costs huge, but so are missed experiences – with the age of retirement skyrocketing, choosing to be a parent can mean essentially trading away the remainder of one’s finite lifetime.

If birthrates are to recover, society must restructure such that we do not live to work and families within a community support each other so parents don’t have to forfeit the people they were prior to parenthood and can have lives beyond their job and kids.

So childless men should be expected to pay for free child care through taxes, but we’ll keep fathers in check by having the social expectation they take on a greater role in childcare? That system isn’t really engineered to optimize for men bonding with children, it will just inevitably result in polygamy really.

We had a system that optimized for male attachment to children and it was the societal expectation to marry and for marriage to really be til death do you part.