It’s women pursuing careers that is making birth rates drop.

Their birth rate isn't falling because of barriers to women succeeding in the workplace. The countries which have the most equal and tolerant workplaces and family-friendly policies for working women also have falling birthrates.

It's a modernity problem, imo. More people than ever live isolated away from large support networks of people, substituting online connections for real ones. We also work longer on average, and both spouses work, so childcare and home economics has to be paid for with either money or increasingly previous time. Even a single income household is very aware that they are paying for kids with the lost potential revenue. That choice is harder and harder to make and then justify to increasingly polarized people, some of whom think staying at home is anathema and others who think the exact opposite. Another thing is that people are less connected to their cultural roots and we have less of an old world mentality of "continuing our bloodline" and less desire to sacrifice for "legacy" etc.

A lot more factors I could get into, but in such an environment saying "Oh we're not planning to have kids" is so much easier, no wonder countries around the world are facing this crisis.

> away from large support networks

This. Here's my thoughts based on personal experience that backs just that. Copy pasted from an earlier comment:

People keep trying to find a purely economic reason for why folks are having less kids. I think I'm satisfied with the very simple reason that raising kids is hard work. Most people feel like 1 kid already gets their hands full. That's really it IMO. Whenever it was that joint families split up into disparate nuclear families, obviously the load of raising say 5 kids that was being shared among 20 people, suddenly fell on just 2 people. In the places with high fertility rate, you will almost surely observe joint families. I'm from India where we have such demographic variety that you can see adjacent areas with completely different fertility rates. In one, you will see old-style large houses with courtyards and 15+ people in them living as a joint family. Invariably these people have more kids. But in the next town with more nuclear families and modernish apartments, you will be lucky to see 2 kids per family. [1]

This is what births the secondary economic incentives which are mentioned a lot in popular discourse. For example, if you're already living in a house with 15 people your financial realities will require a similar number of people in the next generation to continue the same lifestyle.

[1] Wealth is not a confounding factor here. The specific two areas I have in mind are both more or less equally wealthy, one has folks running a coconut business primarily and the other is a small town with the usual assortment of office jobs.

I also think it's the extended "adolescence" that permeates many modern western countries. I know young people who are approaching 30, barely out of their parents' house, own nothing, and still have not really engaged with being the owner of their lives. The idea of having kids is nowhere on their radar; it's just something they see as totally daunting in the amount of work they imagine it would require.

I think the time to have kids is when you are young and full of energy and still have youthful fearlessness about the future. Fertility for women starts dropping at around age 25 and certainly by 30. Then you're dealing with seeing doctors trying to get pregnant, the stress of careers, approaching middle age, and declining energy levels.

> I think I'm satisfied with the very simple reason that raising kids is hard work. Most people feel like 1 kid already gets their hands full. That's really it IMO. Whenever it was that joint families split up into disparate nuclear families, obviously the load of raising say 5 kids that was being shared among 20 people, suddenly fell on just 2 people.

I think you're falsely assuming that, over history, it has taken a constant amount of effort to raise a child. I recently read an aside in some recent article about birthrates that current-day American working mothers spend as much time on their kids as 1970s-era stay-at-home mothers. For that to be true, parents/society must be making child-rearing much more work than it was 50 years ago.

So I agree with the GP, it's a modernity problem (or rather, a modern culture problem).

That strengthens my point actually.

If raising a kid has become much harder today in some cases, then it's even more impractical to have many kids without having a joint family to support you.

> If raising a kid has become much harder today in some cases, then it's even more impractical to have many kids without having a joint family to support you.

My point is raising a kid isn't actually harder. Also the intense effort can backfire, resulting is worse off kids (e.g. the anxiety and lack of resilience that results from helicopter parenting).

My other point is the joint family thing seems like a wash: yes they can support you, but you also have to support them in equal measure.

> you also have to support them in equal measure

On aggregate over the course of your life, yes, but that's not a useful thing to state is it. It is certainly not true for an individual day/week, you get a lot of extra help when you're raising kids. It becomes more true once the kids reach a certain age where they are amenable to listening to anyone in the house, freeing up the parents for what you mentioned.

The difference is simply night and day, having seen both first hand.

female liberation is the cause of falling birth rates

If the AI prophets are right, falling birthrates and not replacing the native population with poverty immigrants is probably the right way moving forward.