There was an old lady who lived in a shoe...

[psyah]

Re: There was an old lady who lived in a shoe…

@Ghost14

Also keep in mind that the very low infant mortality rate is a very recent phenomenon. Back in the day people had lot of kids because only a few of them would survive to adulthood.

Being able to choose to have just one kid, and being (relatively) certain that he/she will survive is sort of a luxury.

This is a very tough question because in some first world countries people are not having enough kids, while the third world is overpopulated. I was reading an article on Bill Gates’ work with vaccines and he found that people have lots of kids partly because of the uncertainty of their survival, as opposed to the common hypothesis that people in the third world have lots of kids solely because of a lack of sex education.

I’ve even heard of some couple have their tubes tied/vasectomies because they consider it environmentally unfriendly to have children.

Again we are making the assumption that people had many children BECAUSE there was high infant mortality … this is not true … Many of the people had no idea of what “infant mortality” was or represented and they definitely did not consciously work out a method to mitigate a risk of child loss … they simply lived their lives and had children.

And then today modernity brings us technology which gives us a false sense of security that children will survive until that is they cross the road or get shot in the street … The affairs of life are in His hands.

The people who do not want to have children out of fear of quality of life are going to lose out.