I am not sure what you mean. Most people in the world including every single one of your ancestors has managed to have kids - including the physical aspects.
People aren’t comparing today to the ancient past. They’re by and large, comparing life to when they grew up.
So on HN, that’s the 70s through the 90s.
Since then maternal mortality in the USA has only increased. The reasons vary, but this still supports your comment as less people ought to be willing to risk having more children.
I would add, that this stat also pairs with the prevalence of hard pregnancies in the USA, so people may become more protective of their children since they suffered more to have them.
Other countries don’t have this issue, and also have more free range child allowances (e.g. Japan with low mortality, low number of children, but highly independent children supported and watched by adults in general and not their parents).
If one in 8 has that kind of accident in America they will seize all the kids and you will lose all of them, so other than just spreading your DNA that approach won't work. There are many, many documented cases of people having all their kids seized because they had a child with a brittle bone disease, and after their brittle bones break (happens easily with such child) the government blames the parent and takes all the other children too.
3 means 3x the chance of them all being taken away when something goes wrong. 1 seems better if your goal is to have at least one child remaining in custody with you to age 18, since if anything goes wrong other than a provable unavoidable medical accident they're typically all seized.
It actually can't be determined if it's "overstated", because the child snatchers have intentionally hidden the data (under seal, "think of the children") so you can't determine the ratio of "overstating." It is illegal to pull the data, so instead you just have to rely on the many many articles you can pull up of people speaking up on their own accord despite the fact their adversary is usually using their children as leverage to keep them from speaking out.
That is part of the genius. They hide the data then declare "just show us the data" knowing damn well they hid it then try to hide under just being reasonable and why can't you prove it. It's quite sadistic actually and of course arguments such as yours play into this intentional subterfuge. Note that this hiding of evidence, when done by private actors, in a court of law usually means it is entered in evidence in favor of the other side as hiding means the worst case scenario of that is contributed towards the burden of proof ("spoliation of evidence.") You don't get to play the fuck-fuck game of simply asking for additional burden of proof when you've intentionally induced spoliation of the evidence.
