Comment by atmavatar

The women's rights movement came with both positive and negative effects that impact birth rates.

Normalizing women as equals in the workforce is great from a rights perspective, but as incomes have started to equalize (and actually start to tip the other direction in younger generations), the pool of prospective mates has shrunk because a large majority of women won't date men that cannot out-earn them. Additionally, there is the problem that a woman taking maternity leave suffers a long-lasting (if not permanent) dip in her earnings from then on. Equivalent paternity leave could help to balance things out, but in the US at least, there are virtually no employers who offer it.

Another hallmark of the women's rights movement which is largely negative has been the demonization of housewives as lessers and treating raising kids as a form of servitude. That in itself discourages having children. However, as stay at home dads are still largely considered unacceptable, having kids now increasingly relies upon extremely expensive day care, significantly increasing their economic burden. If a dual-income household made significantly more than their single-income household counterparts of prior generations (adjusted for inflation), this may be a non-issue, but if anything, dual-income is often required just to get by nowadays.