Here's a sensible man's voice. Allow me to add historical evidence. John D'Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman wrote in _Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America_:
***** In the late eighteenth century, the first signs of decline in marital fertility rates foreshadowed the dramatic transformation that occurred in marital sexuality during the nineteenth century. White reproductive rates illustrate this change. In 1800, a married couple had an average of slightly over seven children. A generation later, in 1825, the marital fertility rate had fallen to under six children. By 1850, married women were bearing on an average only 5.42 children, and by 1880, only 4.24. Throughout this period, as childbearing decreased, both male and female life expectancy increased. Thus, childbearing and childrearing were occupying an increasingly smaller proportion of an adult woman's life.
These overall rates mask regional, racial, and ethnic differences. The drop in marital fertility began with the northern middle class; ultimately it extended to all groups within society, but at varying times....Given the higher rates in these rural and immigrant families, a very steep decline among urban middle-class families accounts for much of the overall decline in white marital fertility.
A constellation of motives created the trend toward smaller families. Economic interest encouraged some families to have fewer children....Family limitation also reflected changing religious beliefs, especially a new willingness on the part of individuals to take their futures into their own hands, rather than accepting that the will of God must prevail. Finally, the decline in marital fertility may have evidenced the growing power of women in domestic sphere, where they insisted on limiting births, either to free themselves from burdensome reproductive labors or to wield control over sexuality....Thus, a combination of women's and men's interests may have motivated family limitation.
As important as the question of why family size declined is the question of how reproductive control took place. Abundant historical evidence suggests that nineteenth-century Americans turned to contraception and abortion in order to limit their families....Both contraception and continence helped reshape sexual meanings. Contraceptive use forced couples to think of sexual intercourse as something other than a reproductive act....
According to the limited sources that describe who chose to abort and why, northern white women, both working-class and middle-class, single and married, sought abortions....
...Meanwhile...white supremacists emitted shrill cries of "race suicide," as middle-class Protestant women seemed unable, or unwilling, to match the high fertility of foreigners. Pointing to South Africa as the model of what might happen to the Caucasian race, one sociologist in 1903 wrote that whites there "stand aghast at the rabbit-like increase of the blacks." Theodore Roosevelt lambasted the Yankee middle-class woman who avoided childbearing as a "criminal against the race." (57-64; 215) *****
In other words, desire for family limitation is, pace Jim, more an expression of hope for the future economic improvement, and better-off women, not desperately poor women, have been the ones to spearhead in the decline in the birth rate. Incidentally, this is an argument against coercive population control, in that as soon as women are empowered to do so (due to increasingly hopeful economic prospects, increasing gender equality in education & work, etc.), women respond by limiting childbirths. Further empowerment follows empowerment (pace the immiseration hypothesis of some people's views on birth control). And in the absense of puritanical culture and of an anti-abortion movement, abortions will be fewer and had earlier (excepting medical necessities), as the Swedish experience can tell us, and this doesn't increase the birth rate either, even with the provisions of excellent pro-natalist laws and programs. Just the facts.
Yoshie