On Oct 24, 3:50 pm, Pat Flannery wrote:
Johnny1a wrote:
Population growth rates aren't controlled by the availability of birth
control. In fact, nobody knows what determines population growth and
decrease rates once the basic necessities of life are covered, they
seem to follow a logic of their own.

One problem they had with birth control in the third world (besides
religious taboos, and macho issues) was that a lot of the people
couldn't understand that the principle the condom worked on was (there's
actually one culture I read about somewhere out there that recognizes no
connection between sex and pregnancy. Women get pregnant when the gods
deem they should get pregnant, and if a husband is away from his wife
for a year and comes back to find her nursing a baby...well, that was
just her time to get pregnant, that's all). :-)
In one village in Africa, a family planning nurse demonstrated how the
condom was to be used by putting it over the end of a broom handle; on
her next visit, she noted that the villagers were now convinced that the
birth rate was going to drop as every broom handle in the village now
had a condom on it.
Considering the number of unwanted pregnancies that occur here in the
U.S. even nowadays, I suspect that easily available, reliable and low
priced birth control worldwide would lead to a major decline in
birthrate to below replacement levels, especially in non-sustenance
agrarian societies - as that is one of the few areas where a large
family is a asset, as many children means many workers to till the land.
Even here in North Dakota average farm family size is far lower since
the advent of advanced farm machinery, as back in the 1930's farm
families with ten or more children were not uncommon. I even knew a farm
girl born in the late 1950's who had eleven brothers and sisters.

Pat

The trouble with this is that history doesn't support it. There have
been periods in history when population growth levelled off or even
went negative, then surged again. The reasons don't seem to be
primarily economically rooted.

In the late Roman Empire, for ex, there were concerns with falling
populations and low birth rates. It wasn't caused by the ready
availability of reliable birth control.