You contradict yourself. Japan is widely known to be behind on gender equality, much more so than the U.S., and you point out that birth rates are declining faster there. Which means if anything that women's rights increases birth rates.
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.
> The burden of proof is on you to tell us why women's rights affects birth rates at all.
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.
There are too many factors for me to take studies like this seriously. For example, what does 'education' mean? Does this word have the same meaning in the context of 17th century Europe? 8th century B.C. Egypt?
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.
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.