Birth control is readily accessible to women of lower economic status for
decades in the U.S., and yet this is precisely the group that has the most
children.  It is those in the middle and upper classes, with significant
accumulation of wealth (and anyone who owns a car, a home, and furniture
has significant wealth, as poor as they might sometimes feel) who have the
least children.

I honestly don't see how that correlates with who brings home the bacon,
either. To the best of my knowledge it has never been shown that women who
choose to be housewives and have husbands with the traditional breadwinner
role automatically choose to have baby after baby.  I know more than one
housewife who chose never to have more than one child, and others who chose
to have no more than two.  Although certainly those families who have many
children are more likely to have a parent at home full time, such people
are still few and far between compared to those with only one or two
children.

The only thing that has ever been shown to consistently get people to
-voluntarily- have less children is wealth.  When people have wealth, they
feel they have something to preserve and therefore do not want to endanger
that with the economic burden of many children.  They also have less need
to rely on their children to provide for them in their old age, which is a
significant motivating factor in many societies (though not, notably, in
the U.S.).  People also, I think, instinctively know that if they have the
resources that wealth brings, their chances of having healthy, happy
children who survive to adulthood are much higher, which those who live in
poverty (including, by the way, hunter/gatherers) cannot be nearly so
confident of.

Wealth, as typified by our high-tech Western civilization, is the only
thing that has ever been shown to get people to voluntarily stop having
children.  THis is not necessarily contingent upon any one economic system,
but it does happen that to date the free-market economic system is the only
thing that's ever been shown to allow a majority of the members of any
large society to become wealthy.  If some other economic system made it
possible for the majority of members of a society to become wealthy, then
that, too, would probably work (unless there was something about that
society that also encouraged people to have children).

In the meantime only two other things have been shown to work to bring down
the birth rate:

Totalitarian dictatorship, as typified by communism, or a strict
hunter/gatherer lifestyle in primitive conditions, in which women tend to
naturally have less children and in which the rate of infant mortality and
death in childbirth are significantly high.

 -=-=-

Once in a while you get shown the light/
 In the strangest of places if you look at it right   ---Robert Hunter

http://www.syndicomm.com/esmay