spend a couple months in and out of your local NICU, as I have, seeing firsthand the depressingly common spectacle of premature neonates being left alone for days, sometimes over a week, by parents (or parent) who can't make the time to visit their own clinging-to-life offspring.

Because their lives are already overburdoned by the several other - somehow always toddler-age - children in tow with them. Lives frequently complicated by various degrees of substance abuse, leading to the NICU births. You would not be as comfortable googling some factoid response here.

Whatever the macro trend may be in terms of total birthrate, its the constitution of those births, in terms of quality of life, my post was referring to.

Pretty heavy selection bias in that sample. All the people who chose not to have kids obviously are not going to be in the NICU. Among the people who do choose to have kids, those with good prenatal care and healthy habits are going to be very underrepresented in the NICU, particularly if you're in a community where you see a lot of substance abuse. So what's left is what you've observed.

This seems awfully America-centric. I understand what you're saying but in my experience it is a local phenomena, not global. Most parents (or at least a parent) spend a lot of time with their kids at the start of their life.