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Not a sole causative factor but certainly a contributing factor. That's why I said 'in part'. Porn doesn't help. It glamorizes casual sex, makes it more normal. That probably helps reduce fertility.
And there are many subtleties about culture we don't understand. There are certain high-fertility cultures that remain, usually concentrated among religious groups. Nearly all of these intensely religious groups have strong obscenity prohibitions - radical Islam, radical Jewish factions, radical Christian sects like the Mormons. China tries to suppress obscenity but has low fertility - it's not a panacea. But anti-obscenity is part of some mysterious essence of stable, sustainable civilization/culture that we lack. I think we should've preserved it since it's not exactly easy to reimpose. Plus there are all the other harms in exploitation and creating unrealistic expectations that feminists talk about.
Controlling for income, isn't a potentially important difference in the cases of the predictive success or failure of your hypothesis (1) social groups where women are strongly encouraged to focus on child-rearing and (2) those where they are not and have been legally dissuaded from having large families for generations?
At this sort of level of complexity, I don't think that messy correlations are going to tell you much about causation. It's better to look at the values and incentives that people have, and analyse their probable effects. Is it possible to have a highly obscene society where women are incentivised to spend a lot of time in the home raising children? I don't know. We do know that it is possible to have the opposite, though its compatibility with modern Western income and law is dubious.
China certainly has other factors going on than just obscenity. I only brought up China to say that I didn't think banning obscenity was singlehandedly capable of making your population graph back into a pyramid. I completely agree that it's a multi-factor issue. I agree that it's very hard to go back to the old equilibrium.
But the highest fertility groups tend to be religiously conservative and anti-obscenity. I'd add pre '45 'For the glory of the Emperor' Japanese to the list of high fertility cultures. They also engaged in heavy censorship, including obscenity. Even on the 'incentives and values' level I can only see fertility-lowering effects from pornography. It encourages people to do unconventional sex acts for fun or variety. It glamorizes promiscuity, which reduces marriage. The Catholics go on about how sex should be about reproduction, not pleasure - they're known for being fecund.
Now maybe losing obscenity laws is a byproduct of being a certain kind of individualist society that has low fertility, not a contributor. But is anything so clearcut as that? Everything affects everything else, effects are also causes. I'm confident that allowing pornography has some kind of effect on culture - whether it's embarassing men or women who don't think they're up to standard or pushing weird trends like furries or incest or whatever, the effects all seem to point in one direction.
Are Catholic birth rates impressive, when controlling for income? The pleas of the Pope didn't seem to do much for Irish or Irish-American birth rates, once the Irish weren't poor. As Terence O'Neill (a Protestant Prime Minister of Northern Ireland) put it:
Bigotry aside, he had a point. Catholic birth rates seem to be high only because of Catholics who were poor. As Catholic groups catch up with standards of living that first emerged in Protestant Northern European societies, their fertility also falls.
Or maybe they don't have a direct causal connection.
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