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Your 30x-great-grandparents didn't have diapers, and any cloth their child wore, the woman probably had to spin or weave herself. Food was available, but instead of being "$1/lb of lentils", had to be sown and harvested by hand (unless a bad season came, in which case, hopefully you have enough preserved). Instead of 'decent, but not ideal labor laws' - maybe you were a serf. Medical care was often counterproductive in the 1800s, to say nothing of the 1600s, and ~ half your kids would die before adulthood - vs today, where advanced medical technology built on millions of man-hours of basic research and 'big pharma' development is available to both the poor and the rich, and the gap continues to close (even things like 'obamacare' helped a little!). With within-state freedom of movement, a functioning rental market, a, by any historical standard, class-free and socially permissive society, and the internet, 'replacing a network' is easier than ever - 'moving to a new city' isn't a catastrophe. Historically, 'plane tickets' or 'moving truck rentals' weren't available to people of any class. Interstate travel is, today, incredibly cheap in any sense. Historical people lived in a society 100x more backwards and reactionary than ... even the backwards evangelicals of 2000. Instead of a therapist, a priest?
Despite all of that, said grandparents would, given the calories available, and after accounting for childhood mortality, have a TFR of 3 or higher. This is both because birth control didn't exist, because children became economically useful quickly, and because it was heavily socially valued. Every point you made is on a strong trajectory towards 'less of a burden' - yet you just don't prioritize having children over them!
You say all of this is easy...and yet if I got pregnant tomorrow, I would not be able to make enough money in nine months to pay for my child's daycare, clothing, food, and my own needs. I would have to surrender my child to the state, because I would also have medical debt on top of that for the not-free doctors I would have to see while pregnant, unless I wanted to avoid doctors and attempt to induce a miscarriage by negligence, which could be life threatening to me or hurt my fertility. You say interstate travel is incredibly cheap, but the amount of money required to move myself from a one-bedroom apartment to anywhere else is far from cheap for my wages.
So, I am not too sure where "you don't prioritize having children" comes in.
A person who very strongly valued children would dramatically cut back other expenses, whether they be 'travel', 'restaurants', 'not living in a low COL area', 'daycare' (when mom and dad were working the fields, they couldn't exactly hire childcare. maybe live near grandparents or something?). They would not choose to not have children over potential medical difficulties.
I'm not sure what your wages are, but I'm confident it's doable. If you and your bf/husband thought it was essentially necessary to have and raise children, these issues would be less!
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Okay, that's 'extreme' to a modern ear, but - how do bottom 5% income americans have children? Or, for that matter, extremely poor urban africans or south asians? Surely every problem you have is worse for the poorest americans and 10x worse for poor africans/south asians, yet their fertility rates are higher than ours.
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