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No offense, but you're roughly two decades behind the state of the discussion. The rough trajectory goes like this (I'll use germany as the example since I'm most familiar with it, but afaik it's quite similar for many different western countries, save maybe a decade or so earlier or later):
60s: Germany is on a high due to the baby boom with a birth rate of ca 2.3. It switches to an overtly pay-as-you-go pension system, which works very well due to the circumstances. Some already point out that it will only work if birth rates keep stable and say we need to have policies to ensure that it does (of course, this is actually true of almost any economic system, but pay-as-you-go makes it overtly obvious). Chancellor Adenauer dismisses them stringently with "children will always be had" and this is also the public sentiment, so nothing is done.
80s: Birth rates went done substantially to ca 1.5. However, it's generally chalked up to be more an issue of delayed children rather than not having them at all. (Also, as a note: Germany already had rather generous maternity leave during this time already)
00s: The first generation of women has become old enough with a low birth rate so that it's clear that delaying is not the reason - people really have significantly less children overall (only 1.3, even). This coincided with a great increase in women employment, which was an amazing economic boon. When asked, women directly say the reason is economic - not enough money, not enough protection from discrimination after maternity leave, not enough family accommodation, ... and so on. Obviously, people are reluctant to rock the boat too much when times are good. So the focus is on increasing the (economic) benefits over the years in the expectation that the birth rate will go up again. People aren't terribly worried and the discussion is not really big in the public. The only who are worried a lot are, more often than not, literal nazis, so they are still easy to dismiss. <--- you are here.
10s: The birth rate didn't change, at all. More people get worried, since at the current rate there will be a big crunch in the 30s when the baby boomers retire. But in 2015 a new possible saviour turns up: Immigration! The immigration of earlier years usually was too small to be demographically notable, the large waves now were so massive that they actually could plausibly make up for the crunch. While this wasn't the primary reason that we opened the borders, it was mentioned multiple times by the left wing and made it hard for the then-mostly economic right to argue against it (it went roughly like this: "We worry about having not enough workers in a few years, now we are gifted plenty of young people, what are you complaining about!"). So policy doesn't change much, especially since accommodating the immigrants is too expensive to plausible further increase child benefits.
20s: It becomes very clear that the immigrants are actually an additional drain, not a benefit, to the economy. Birth rates also pretty much didn't change, except a short-term anomaly around covid. Now there actually isn't enough time left to solve the problem until the 30s - kids born now would only be teenagers. In fact, the negative impacts already become noticeable since some boomers already scale back work or even retire early, and the general economy is bad enough that people get unhappy. As usual, this is the moment the wider public really groks that there is a problem at all. Behind the scenes for the last decade, lots of overwhelmingly progressive, optimistic scientist have been looking for any policy, anywhere in the world, that increase the birth rates. There are none. All known developed countries have low birth rates. The discourse gets pretty gloomy, and the only reliable relationship that anyone can find across most countries is a negative one between female employment and birth rate. This coincides with a general rise of the right-wing across the entire west.
It's not terribly surprising here that some are jumping to coercive measures, and it's definitely not coming out of nowhere. My personal opinion is most close to pronatalist Lyman Stone (and to a lesser degree the Collins), which is that the problem is cultural and can't reasonably be solved economically. As a father who shares family obligations equally, I can tell you that especially small ones are a lot of fucking work (and money), and they will not only reduce your immediate work time, they also reduce your career opportunities and your free time. It's almost impossible to redistribute so much that having kids becomes economically beneficial. If you tell women that careers are important to them, they will not have kids, bc you can't have both and everyone knows it. Men will generally not blow up their career, either, especially since women don't actually respect house-husbands. A culture that idealizes self-actualization also suppresses child-rearing, since they are in the way. Etc. That doesn't mean coercion, but pretty much everything you propose has been tried in one country or another and found wanting. Of course the old arrangement (male main breadwinner, women part-time worker + child care) still works, but there is an ever-increasing portion of the population who is not willing to do that anymore. And once you've changed to the new dual-income model, the margins become quite thin so making a family work on top of that will include quite a lot of sacrifices. Worse, you have to outright compete with the DINKs.
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