The cultural consensus that children are very frightening, so *of course* we all want to limit their numbers, is overwhelming. People don’t even realize they’re being rude, because they’re just expressing what “everyone” knows.
The Pope, I believe, has hit on a key point: “arrogating” the power and authority to control life. It’s more socially acceptable to have a large multiple birth through IVF or ovulation stimulation that it is to have a large number of children, over many years, through the natural processes of marriage. The former shows that you’ve taken control, and the latter is frightening because you haven’t planned and deliberately caused it.
Five hundred years from now ---- if the human race has not erased itself line by line and gene by gene, has not replaced itself with some race of Orcs, half-chimp and half-machine --- people will way that the turning point in our preservation as a species was the publication of Humanae Vitae in 1968.
Paul VI was thought a weak, Hamlet-like, vacillating pope. But he was a prophet: for those who have ears to hear.