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Notes -
It's just the demographic transition model. For literally millennia the TFR was hovering around two point something, simply because we were so limited by external forces: agricultural productivity and infant mortality, massive families of the recent past and of modern-day Africa were a fluke.
The difference between the modern system of reproduction and the traditional system is that the traditional one allowed for rapid bounce backs. If your village's population had been halved by war, famine or pestilence, you now had double the amount of arable land, meaning much better diets, much fewer hard winters, thus much lower infant mortality, ensuring that in the span of one or two generations the population would recover.
There are no such hard limits on the modern first-worlders. If you somehow made every woman in the US pregnant with triplets they couldn't abort, practically none of these children would starve to death or grow up stunted.
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