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When a trait is selected for for a long time, it's heritability ultimately drops to zero. If fertility has been strongly selected for, we should expect its heritability to be very low and, therefore, further selection should be very difficult. That said, heritability actually probably hasn't been selected for for very long because having as many children as possible doesn't make sense if you don't have the resources to support them all.
Judging by the behaviour of some of my ex-girlfriends, this is obviously false.
This is a popular myth, but it's false. Empirical evidence shows that children have always been net recipients of resources from their parents over the course of their lives. If you think about it, it's the only thing that makes any sense evolutionarily. Parents who don't invest as much as possible into their offspring are a disadvantage to those that do. It makes no sense for old parents who don't reproduce to take resources from their children instead of letting their children invest those resources in their grandchildren.
"Some" is the key word here. If this was strongly selected for, literally everyone would desperately want as many kids as possible and take whatever necessary actions to achieve that. But only some people want them, and even then "only" normal numbers. This is clear evidence that wanting kids was in the past at best weakly selected for. Compare that to sex or partnership - asexuality is extremely unusual among males, while almost all women generally hate loneliness.
I also want to note here that significant variability is actually a prerequisite for fast selection - if nobody wanted kids intrinsically we would be fucked, as we would have to rely on de-novo generation of mutations and/or wholly new attitudes which are unreliable and then take a long-ass time to fixate in a population. But it's more like a two-digit percentage of the population already wants kids seriously, which only requires a few generations to mostly fixate.
Retirement in most countries is also a net recipient of resources over the course of most people's live - here in germany it is said we get less than half of the money we put in back! Our arguments don't really disagree. The point is that the children will care for their parents in old age when they can't fully provide for themselves anymore, which for most of history was only a few years. We know they did because we have records of them doing so. Still of course if you look over the entire life, children will have received far more resources from their parents than vice versa.
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