Perhaps, but that often means selecting a partner more quickly, which is another gamble with potentially terrible consequences.

Life is full of such gambles and it's inevitable.

Anyone who drives risks their life more than they risk having a special needs child at reasonably non-late age.

We just brush off most such gambles because:

1. People have a terrible intuition for probabilities.

2. If it were better, they would go insane.

I agree. I'm saying that "just have kids younger" isn't a good solution to the risks of developmental defects, because it's usually merely a trade of that risk for a different one.

My intuition is that taking too long to select a partner carries the same risk.

Technology becomes a way to hedge bets. Maybe the demand for egg freezing, IVF, surrogacy will rise, and associated costs will drop.

Easy to prescribe, hard to implement for the last two generations or so

It's not like people had an established career when they had kids at 19 in the 1940s. They just didn't view "being halfway to a comfortable retirement" as the prerequisite to having kids, the way my generation thinks it is.

The difference likely there is in the ‘40s you were seeing improvement after the Great Depression and employment during WWII, followed by the postwar boom. Whereas the past two generations have seen precarity increase while living standards falter if not drop compared to their parents’ generation. So they are striving to recreate what they once experienced in their childhood, yet may never return.

Also the entirety of society including their families emphasizing the importance of higher education, good careers, etc. even as the latter is harder to achieve and the former becomes increasingly devalued, yet pricy.

People had kids even in the 30s, too. During tough times, we have to work harder and endure more adversity. Our great grandparents understood this just fine. In western countries, current generations (including my own) are incredibly soft, and expect that because they know boom times existed before, we are simply owed an equally easy time automatically — but in reality, there are often external factors that just don’t allow that to happen.

Contrast China, for example. 1950-1990 was not a 40-year prosperity party like it was in America and Western Europe. Therefore, they are at least twice as willing as we are to grind, and as a result multiplied their economy an astounding amount over the past 35 years. You can see the same thing in many development countries today. They take nothing for granted.

But people are working harder- they’re simply working harder at their jobs.

It should also be noted that the birth rates in China are not increasing, either, despite the end of the One Child Policy. Partly it is also because the younger generation feels immiseration from higher costs of living and fewer opportunities- see the concept of involution.

Finally, during the Great Depression, fertility rates in the U.S. dropped to all-time lows. Not unlike the Great Recession, which has triggered a nonstop decline. We all live in the shadow of 2008.

I think the best advice to having kids young is to lower your expectations. The only reason people ‘cannot’ have children young is because they want a specific kind of life for themselves and their kids that is incompatible with that.

It is absolutely a prerequisite to having kids responsibly.

Education and health care are fantastically expensive now, as well as inflation chipping away at purchasing power, each year more than the last due to compounding effects.

To have children without being financially secure is one of the most foolish, selfish, and irresponsible things anyone can choose to do.

I wonder how much of that is because people who are autistic (for example) find love later, and then pass down their autism.

Almost everyone are having children later.