Carol, you are dead right. To lower the birth rate in any country what is most needed is to:

- reduce poverty
- educate people better, specially the women
- improve the women's economic circumstances and their power over determining their own personal destiny

Women are the glue that holds any society together. (men make a lot of surface noise, but the women keep things actually functioning in a coherent and useful fashion) Once the women in a society become free beings and are properly educated, that society cannot help but move forward to a far better condition for everyone.

And let me quote William Shatner when I add to the above this further statement: "I am a man!"

And I'm not stupid. ;-) I know what we owe to the women of this world.