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Good post overall, addressed a lot of my interjections as I read through it.
The thing is I think the premise is sort of a category error: "Be honest about why you don't want children" is basically resolved as "because you just don't want to, not some hallucinated moral justification." But "You don't want children because you don't want children" is not exactly an insightful notion: as your post notes, nobody in the past seems to have had this problem. And from first principles, Darwinian dynamics imply normal people do want children, as the ones that don't will mostly be wiped from the board each generation, selecting for those that do. Yes, there's some conflation between wanting sex and wanting children, but it would be silly to contend these are fully independent: we have abortion now, yes, but they had abortion in the past, too, it was just post-birth abortion, so I think the distinction is more one of modern sensibilities than one that would be of Darwinian relevance. Having children is pretty much universally seen as a good thing, if not an outright divine blessing, in human cultures across time and space. Further, even if you cut the abortion rate to 0, we'd still have well below replacement fertility.
So why did people stop wanting children? Many contend they didn't: they stopped having children, yes, but they didn't stop wanting children.
I think there are many reasons, but one reason I think is significant but rarely noted is that the campaigns against teen pregnancy have, thanks to the rise of rationalism, finally been successful. In the past, when Christian norms reigned, sex education was basically a crotchety old woman badgering you to behave yourself because an invisible man in the sky said so, and obviously teenagers don't care what some crotchety old woman says about an invisible man in the sky, so they do what teenagers do, have an oopsie, then a shotgun wedding where we all pretend to not know what's going on, and then you're left with a healthy family. Traditional sex education, in a nominal sense, completely failed to do its job -- though in a Darwinian sense, it very much succeeded! But today, rational autists have analysed the situation and concluded "Oh, if we want to prevent teenagers from getting pregnant, having a crotchety old woman tell them about an invisible man in the sky is obviously an ineffective tactic. What would actually be effective is showing them lots of pics and footage of sexually-transmitted infections!" Well, as it turns out, the rationalists were correct, and the teenagers did indeed finally start behaving as the tradcons say God intended, and now we're facing the judgment of Darwin. The fertile demographics, of course, have largely eschewed this rationalist nonsense, and continue to use the ineffective form of sex education, as God intended.
I think the education issue is part of the story as well. A teenager in 1600 could just start adulting at 14-15 and be just fine. You didn’t need to be able to read or do high level math, or even geometry. You just became a blacksmith, or a farmer by following dad around. Modern people need an almost absurdly long education in highly complex skills that massively cut into prime boot knocking years that happen in the teenage years. A 16 year old male and 16 year old female are biologically the most horny humans around. But, those kids are not free to indulge even if they want to. Instead, we make them sit in classrooms learning about mollusks in preparation for taking the SAT with a view to going to college where they will learn higher levels of skills that hopefully within 5-7 years after graduation will have them earning enough money to get a two bedroom apartment in which, by the time these humans are ready to have children in the financial sense, they have much lower libido and the woman has missed half to 2/3 of her fertility to the education system. Then everyone is like “wait, why no kids?” It’s because by the time a person stable enough to have kids, they’re too old to have kids. Hence fewer kids.
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