Agreed, hence my wording of: “solve much of,”
At least one of the articles, from what I can recall of the top of my head. (I really need to archive what I read for later reference!) - I can try and find these articles and reference them here if anyone is interested.
Anyways, the article mentioned the:
Issue.
The badly paraphrased author’s rebuttal went something along the lines of:
For those in poverty and w/o rights, or easy access to contraception, many women end up having many more kids then necessary to reach this goal.
- having many kids to care for at once increases the mortality rate for all the kids.
- You only need 1 child to survive to adulthood to care for you in your old age, especially in many of these cultures where marriage rates are very high, and it is expected to take care of in law parents like your own.
Contraception would allow a mother to keep the number of kids they have to manageable level, instead of having kid(s) every year.
Teenage pregnancy in many poor societies usually means all education stops, especially for the mother, but quite often for the father as well.
I personally suspect all this is greatly over simplified, but data comparison has shown that:
Works in places it was well implemented. It lifts entire societies out of poverty. I been to several countries in central africa where I saw this effort underway and saw over the years, poverty levels to be measurably reduced as the number of kids per capable female drops. Infant and child mortality rates drop greatly as well.
Fast forward to 2020, and some of these central african nations now has lower baby/child mortality rates than some parts of USA.