And if some populations haven't figured out that the dozen-kids-per-household isn't the best strategy, well, I suppose they'll figure it out at some point.
On the other hand, while (and because) I'm not going to bounce around the globe extolling the virtues of my own personal vision of nirvana vis-a-vis population control [...]
I was staying out of this, but Dandy, I have to pick you up on this. If you expect (based on the experience of previous generations) many of your children to die before they reach adulthood, some of the rest to die in childbirth before you reach old age, and you live in a country where your only hope of being cared for in old age is to be looked after by your surviving healthy well-enough-off children, then having as many children as you can is a perfectly rational strategy; you or I would do the same. Not to mention that if reliable safe contraception and sex education isn't available to you, it may be difficult for you to act on a choice to have fewer anyway.
If you want to change the situation, you need to act to decrease infant, child and maternal mortality and provide contraception, not go round exhorting.
