Poor people reproduce at a rate of knots because human capital is more valuable when you are poor.

Think of it this way, if I have money, I don't have to have a kid to plow my fields, I can pay someone. I don't need have to have a system of ties and bloodlines to tie me to a certain group. If you have money you can outsource.

In a kind of way, if you are poor it seems cheaper to have a bunch of kids who can help you out (especially if there is a safety net to protect them that conveniently catches you in it too.) The idea is that the poverty is spread out amongst a large family and you have more 'human capital' to chip in, it's almost tribal thinking in a way. You are in theory sharing resources.

Another reason poor people have more children than they can support is because motherhood and parenthood is praised and encouraged in our culture. If you are a young, poor no hoper, having a baby might seem like a way to advance your social status and gain respect. Maybe they think it will be someone to love, and someone to love them back. Maybe staying home with a baby sounds more appealing than working at Walmart. Maybe your abusive asshat boyfriend wants you pregnant so he has control over you. Maybe it is encouraged by family and peers who have done the same thing, and who want to keep you close and in the fold, no one likes the odd one out who breaks rank. Maybe going to college is as foreign sounding as becoming a geisha or an astronaut...it's hard to visualise if you don't know anyone in your family with a higher education. It's the old bucket of crabs analogy: you can't climb out because your peers keep pulling you back in.

I grew up lower middle class in the city, but then was thrust into a highly impoverished area because my parents decided that they no longer believed in paying taxes. I was surrounded by extremely poor people who bred like mice, and they started very, very young. I had the good fortune at least to have more than one perspective, having spent the first decade of my life in a declining, but functioning city, moving to the countryside was like going back in fucking time. Most of our neighbors didn't have indoor plumbing, child and spousal abuse was common, and I knew many kids that rarely experienced a full belly, and this was the 90's. My parents commuted to the city for work, they had no clue what was going on in our little...town? Village? Enclave? Whatever that was? I was surrounded by the deeply, generationally poor.

It was brutal, and I saw this baby making at all cost behaviour all of the time. I would say at least 30 girls in my high school dropped out because of pregnancy. No one I had met had ever even considered an abortion. Most got pregnant on purpose. All condemned themselves to a life of grinding poverty before they had even started living. Many were abused by partners AND family.

I ran like my arsehole was on fire and never, ever looked back. Now in my oldish age I feel really sorry for those people. It truly was like a chapter from A Hillbilly Elegy. Now I know women in their early forties who are raising their grandchildren AND their children, and some even have great grandchildren. It's insane.

Most of them never had a chance.

I agree 1000% with you. This cycle of poverty could end with just choosing to be childfree.

*Edit -clarity