And many conservative members have left the Church to raise their children elsewhere.
Mostly because we've been hollering about this since the early sixties, when the Church decided to "reach out" to gays because they wouldn't want to marry. Did anyone ask if no desire to marry was the same as remaining celibate? Well, duh.
I speak as an outsider, being an inactive Episcopalian, but this has been my impression over the years: that there has been an increasingly lower number of straight men in the U.S. and in several other countries willing to sign on for a lifetime of celibacy . I am guessing that this is largely due to the huge increase in emphasis on sex in so many areas of life in the U.S., Britain, and Europe. BTW, twenty years or more ago, I heard from a family of Catholic friends who had a son in seminary that the place had a pretty gay subculture. The son did not stay in seminary, but I have never known the exact reason why.
IMHO, creating an order of parish priests who are permitted to marry (like the Orthodox practice) would seem to be a very reasonable action to me, but my background is Protestant so I'm comfortable with a married clergy. However, my experience with female priests in the Episcopal Church has been uniformly bad so I can't say I wish that alternative on the Catholic Church.