As a (young, thus-far childless) woman, I feel it's important to add something that men may not fully grasp and I haven't seen much in the thread so far: what tips the scales in this decision is often not just daycare costs/career prospects, but also the potentially extreme side effects of pregnancy on the body.

Going through the process of being pregnant and giving birth is absolutely terrifying to me and most of my friends. How many tech bros do you know who do their blood labs on a yearly basis, or track their blood sugar daily? How many do sports physio to avoid the possibility of a minor training injury, or do any number of peptide interventions to micro-optimise some aspect of their health or physique?

If having babies, for them, was basically a coin toss re: possibly developing diabetes, ripping open their pelvic floor and becoming incontinent, adding 8 points to your BMI, or major sleeping problems, etc., would they still be as mystified about the low TFR? (Of course, many men go through physical hell when raising children too, and I don't want to diminish their contribution, but on average their physical symptoms are less extreme)

Sometimes the knee jerk 'just get a caesarean' and lower maternal mortality numbers mask the reality of how barbaric the process seems, at least from my vantage point as someone who might one day be involved in the process. The number of privileged women who choose the surrogate path alone should suggest how many women might opt out of the physical part of it, if they could; if having babies isn't a social obligation or a biological inevitability without birth control, there's quite a strong argument for putting it off just one more year...