Fertility rates

The Centre for Population (which I like to think of as a satellite arm of Commonwealth Treasury) just published a paper about forecasting Australia's fertility rates. Two things that I thought about while quickly skimming this paper:

1. Even as fertility rates fall in a given year, it's hard to say whether fertility in general is declining without knowing how many children women are actually having over their lifetime, and whether that has actually decreased compared to women of earlier birth cohorts. Part of the fall in fertility rates is due to women deferring the decision to have babies until older, and they are doing this at higher rates than younger women are giving birth. Because of this, we might see an increase in births for women aged 35 and over, while the number of births for women under 25 continues to decline.
2. If women (or families) became fully in control of when and how many babies they would have (e.g. if birth control technology becomes really advanced, no accidental births, and IVF becomes really successful) and assuming people didn't change their minds, then you could literally predict fertility rates just be asking people how many children they plan to have! I thought that was kind of amazing for some reason.

In general, I think fertility is really interesting because our culture sees it as a deeply personal decision that a woman makes (I'm not sure where men come into the picture, but it seems like they had too much of a say in the 50s, and now it's like they don't get any say at all!), yet at the same time fertility in the aggregate affects our entire society in very substantial ways. Obviously I'm not saying that state control of reproduction is the answer, but nor is it ideal if the state pretends it has nothing to do with it (even if our culture does see it as a personal decision).

I think it's reasonable to believe that more women will choose to have children (or women will choose to have more children) if they are given the support from the state, their employer and their family, to have children without being reduced to just their role as a mother both culturally and economically (since being a full-time carer reduces your earnings capacity and increases your financial dependence on others).

Yes we all know that children can bring joy and are intrinsically valuable as human beings and therefore there are a whole lot of intangible, unmeasurable, non-market (let's say) benefits to having children, that may arguably outweigh the costs of doing so. But this is a very modern concept, one borne out of the fact that we no longer have children because we need to. Throughout history, women had children because it was their economic role (whether it was their choice or not) to supply the family with future workers (sons) and carers (daughters), so to view fertility as a non-economic proposal is unrealistic when it has always been so in our history.