>>Sexual education is firmly embedded at primary schools and beyond. Birth control is promoted. Abortion clinics are safe and legal, but bound to rules (no abortion beyond 20 weeks or so), and yet we have a very low abortion and teen pregnancy rate. The groups with the highest teen pregnancy rates in our case are because of immigrant out of countries where all of the above are less common.
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>Underlying all that is the post-feminist presumption that a low birth rate- or more precisely- a planned birth rate is a good thing.
>I'm not so sure about that.
>My father was one of 11 and so was my mother-in-law (all accidental - no planning in those days.)
>In both cases those large families were huge support mechanisms to members who occasionally needed support.

Which is exactly the reason that the modern times (both capitalism and most of socialisms) insisted on giving as much aid individuals and specially picked groups to replace the family, while at the same time doing their best to break the family up. One way is getting the people to leave the land and come work in the industry (both systems), then displacing workforce at will (count how many couples you know who at some time worked, or were offered to move for that reason, in different cities - again, both systems). Presently the harassment laws, child protection services and other ways the law insinuates itself into common conversation is yet another way to break it up - you may lose your children on a whim of one disgruntled neighbor joined by an overzealous agent (and I still haven't heard a story of one of them having common sense and listening to both sides - but good news aren't news).

Big families are too strong and independent. Neither system likes those.

OTOH, isn't it amazing how there's always two hundred families on the top, which never break up?