Tell me how women's rights could possibly not effect birth rates? It's a major factor.
Also, Japan is nowhere near as expensive as other countries but they are declining the same rate or faster.
Also, Japan is nowhere near as expensive as other countries but they are declining the same rate or faster.
The burden of proof is on you to tell us why women's rights affects birth rates at all. So far the flawed (i.e. batshit insane) reasoning of "women are forced to marry less" doesn't hold.
This is an odd challenge. The relationship between women's education levels and lower fertility rates is a famously strong correlation in the social sciences. There are tons and tons of studies that show that as women's education levels and status rise, fertility levels subsequently drop. Here is a page that links to a bunch of studies, https://worldpopulationhistory.org/womens-status-and-fertili... . But seriously, just Google "women's education levels fertility rates" and you'll find tons and tons of studies.
If we're talking about a certain sort of education received only within the last century or so, I think that should be a pretty big and explicitly stated caveat when spouting "Educating women decreases birth rates." It might be less so that education is the cause, but the social responsibilities that education entails, the role that the educated have in society, etc - that is way different now than it was N years ago.
And that's just one example. So many things are just different in the last 300 years from the last 3000 that it's incredibly difficult to attribute a trend to a single cause. It makes more sense to say it's harder to have children for a variety of factors/the calculus is different, rather than assuming for the bulk of history women have been having children because they lack education/rights.
[1] https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/news/backstories/2160/