It’s actually due to industrialization and urbanization. For subsistence farmers kids were very useful, because they started to help in the fields from a very young age; while for modern urban workers kids are just a drain on limited family resources. Women’s rights are pretty much irrelevant in this scheme, because even if the right succeed in rolling back women’s rights, their husbands still would have the same incentive against having kids. We can also look at GDR-FRG and DPRK-ROK comparisons, where socialist part of the country had consistently higher birth rate due to actually helping families with children, despite having much better women’s rights.
It’s actually due to industrialization and urbanization. For subsistence farmers kids were very useful, because they started to help in the fields from a very young age; while for modern urban workers kids are just a drain on limited family resources. Women’s rights are pretty much irrelevant in this scheme, because even if the right succeed in rolling back women’s rights, their husbands still would have the same incentive against having kids. We can also look at GDR-FRG and DPRK-ROK comparisons, where socialist part of the country had consistently higher birth rate due to actually helping families with children, despite having much better women’s rights.