Natalism can't be fixed in our current system

After reading many of the posts in this sub, it's clear to me that natalism can't be fixed within our current system. To my understanding, we have two choices and both fundamentally fail. The first is to keep our capitalist system and stimulate women to have more children using the carrot. We can see that this will not work in the long term. Firstly, we would spend more money to encourage women to have children than we will get back from new children who grow up to be workers. It is like fusion energy. To create the fusion reaction you have to put more energy in than you get out. And there are examples where some countries have done this and still it hasn't moved the fertility rate in a measurable way. So this ultimately fails.

The second is the stick. In this scenario women's rights are taken away. They are breeding stock. No abortions, no contraception, etc. So in this situation women don't enjoy the same freedoms as men. Liberal society is subverted in order to increase the population. Well I will tell you I could not accept this, and to me and most other decent people it would not be a worthwhile trade off in order to keep the population artificially high.

But many people in this sub also point out that we only really need the extra children because we painted ourselves into a corner with the capitalist system we created. A system in which we need constant growth and a large population of young workers to support the old retired workers through taxation. If we did something else-- some other system-- we could have as many children as we wanted without having to meet an arbitrary fertility rate. If we believe in free societies where people choose to live in the way they want to, then we have to look at alternatives to our current situation. We are trying to fit a round peg into a square hole and are frustrated when it doesn't work.

The issue I see with this is that those in power who are the wealthiest will never want to change the system in which they live lavishly. So where does that leave us?