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I very much doubt the chemical role in fertility decline. For the most part, it's not young people trying and failing to have kids driving the decline, it's people trying and failing to have kids at ever older ages.
It's not chemicals impacting the odds of pregnancy, but it's also not people trying and failing at any age. It's young people trying to not have kids and succeeding that's driving the decline. The birth control pill is released, and within a little over a decade the fertility rate (births-per-1000-women) falls roughly in half, a greater drop than the previous WWI-Great-Depression-WWII plunge. Total Fertility Rate is what we usually care about in the end, but it's an integral of that instantaneous births-per-woman rate over a lifetime, so somewhat obfuscates how rapid the effect was.
In the decades since then, it seems that older people trying to have kids are succeeding more, not failing! The birth rate among mothers 40-44 has more than doubled from 1980-2015 (from very very little up to very little...), the birth rate among 35-39yo mothers is up 150% (which in that case is a significant increase in absolute terms too), and the birth rate among ages 30-34 nearly doubled since 1975.
But at ages 25-29 the rate shows no clear trend downward until a 2006 peak, at 20-24 it's down 25% from the 90s, and at 15-19 it's down nearly 2/3rds.
Looking at provisional 2023 numbers ... the older age groups' birth rate rises have stopped and held mostly flat over the last decade (except that 30-34 might be on its way down now?), 25-29 is more clearly starting its fall, 20-24 is now down 50% from the 90s, and 15-19 is now down by more than 75%.
I suppose there could be chemicals impacting the human drive toward life-long pair mating? In the US marriage has been plummeting for all age brackets for generations. But I think we've got so many cultural factors contributing to that, Occam says don't even bother checking for chemicals right now.
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Yes, but they both can play a role.
On the margins, lower sperm counts are going to make conception take longer which will make the problems of delaying the process even worse.
Like I said, there's probably 'hidden' feedback loops. Women go to college for 4 years, and delay childbirth, and get habituated to delaying childbirth, and there's no real social pressure to remind her that she's got limited time to act, and each year of delay is making it harder. Its a problem that ends up making itself worse, especially if feedback from other sources is included.
One policy I've tongue-in-cheek suggested is that every woman should be forced to wear a timer that counts down to the day she becomes infertile, so as to create some pressure to hurry up the process.
That's assuming that sperm counts are the limiting factor in a meaningful number of cases. Has time to conception meaningfully increased when controlling for age of both partners?
My understanding of reproductive stats is that they tend to be skewed by those who are struggling to conceive tending to meticulously document every attempt, whilst those who are fecund it just happens.
I've got a 5 month old daughter and I know it happened within about 2-3 sessions without protection with my partner, but that's never entering the medical record whilst somebody in their 40s who's exhaustively logging and trying supplementation will be reflected in the research body
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