It's simple. Kids cost too much money. Women have to work at jobs that pay money. Staying home and raising kids doesn't pay money.
https://www.businessinsider.com/why-millennials-birth-fertility-rate-declining-fewer-babies-2022-1
5 reasons more millennials are choosing not to have children
RE
No cookies or paywall again. Lots and lots of articles lately on nothing to see here, that are important to get to you sponsored. Govts now directly funding media, making up for ever declining ratings. They need us to know its a nice steady decline in population of the kind we told Alan2021 he was an idiot to believe was reversing overpopulation.
If the labour shortage is due to people choosing to stay home and not work, living on govt benefits instead, that is made much easier by having children as it greatly increases the payments. For one parent it also removes the need to be trying to find work.
Or maybe with massive excess mortality, the labour shortage is at least partly a people shortage and a ten or twenty fold increase in the trend of fewer live births is also mostly explained by a physical phenomena affecting fertility. The number of intentional inseminations probably follows the same steady trajectory of baseline before 2021. It's accurate data on miscarriages and stillborn that we need.