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This is one of those things where my real life observations don't match up with what everyone is saying online.
My wife is pregnant with our third kid. I live in a single family home neighborhood but the bus stop right outside my house has about three dozen kids spread over 5 busses. (For some reason the neighborhood is split between two school districts for elementary and middle school).
Over the five years I've been in the neighborhood I've made friends with many other parents that have young children. Most of them just two kids. But quite a few with more than two, including two families with five kids.
My older brother has three kids. My younger sister only has one, but that kid is less than a year old and she has spoken about having three.
I had Bryan Caplan as a professor in college when he was collecting information and anecdotes for his "have more kids" book. I met his kids when they were young, because Caplan was willing to invite people to his house for a big Caplacon board gaming event.
My wife's cousin's are all having kids, the ones that aren't are having trouble conceiving, not choosing to abstain. My cousin's are mostly not old enough to be married, but the few that are only one of the three married ones is choosing to not have kids.
Most of my older coworkers have kids. Most of my wife's older coworkers ha e kids.
Basically my life is filled with being around families with kids.
I know its possible to be in a social bubble, but in so many other ways I straddle social bubbles. Of all the people I've described their living situation ranges from dense urban to no one within miles rural. Their political views are all over the map, all types of conservatives, liberals, and libertarians.
It takes me a while to come upon the problem. Its a problem of margins. Each family with kids is slightly smaller than they used to be. And there are slightly more people not having kids. And it's fully possible that most of these changes are happening with people outside of my large social bubble.
So I have no real intuition on why fertility rates are a problem. My wife and I like having kids. I find them generally less restrictive on my social life than a pet. In fact most of my social life is because I have kids. I meet new dads at the park and the pool where my kids play. There is a wine tasting I'm going to tomorrow with a bunch of neighborhood parents at the neighborhood pool.
Yah childbirth is objectively not a fun time. My wife is a geriatric pregnancy and the first trimester has been filled with her not feeling good. Mostly she jokes with other moms about how they seemingly totally forget the annoying parts of child birth. She has maintained a career through it all, and has more of an active job than I do.
I think there is a general neuroticism in the population that makes them worry too much about things. A lot of people kind of freak out about parenthood. My inside take is that it's not that hard and not that big of a deal. If you are placed into a situation you tend to figure things out. But if you spend all your time freaking out about the thing and avoiding it then yah you'll prove yourself right and not be able to do it.
I think it's probably happening everywhere, people just don't realise it. The fertility rates outside of east Asia generally aren't catastrophic, just mildly below replacement. I'd imagine that a large factor is that people are aiming for two kids, which in itself isn't sustainable but when you combine that with some people not being able to have kids and delayed adulthood/parenthood (due to various reasons) and some just get to it too late and end up with just one kid, then you end up with a fertility rate drifting slowly downward while at the same time everyone feels like they're having kids, and having a "normal" amount, but on aggregate they aren't. The goal for the average family needs to be 3+ not 2, otherwise there are less than no margins.
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