

I’d really like to see the evidence for this statement, since it really seems like this trend is just an extension of the phenomenon we see in poorer countries: when you give women education, opportunities, and birth control, fewer of them will have children. It stands to reason that the more education, the more opportunities available, and the more freely accessible birth control is, the fewer women will have children.
If that were true, we would expect richer countries to have higher birth rates. Instead, we see roughly the opposite trend. The richer a country gets, typically, the lower the birth rate. You can’t tell me that a teacher and a data entry clerk in Virginia are less economically capable of raising children than subsistence farmers in Malawi, no matter how high the rent in Virginia is.
If you want to see high income places with high birth rates, then you end up in very traditional/religious cultures, like Mormons and the Arab petro-states, where women face extremely high cultural pressure (if not force/violence) to be child-bearers.