10 August 2011  Wealth and Reproduction  Until about a decade
ago, the recent trend was for the poor to have more children
than the rich, both domestically and internationally. But, this
trend has since reversed in the U.S., largely due to the impact
of fertility treatments and factors surpressing fertility in the
poor like a reduction in teenage pregnancy rates. But, this was
a historical anomaly for the century or so that the trend of the
poor having more children persisted. Prior to that point, the
well to do in places as different as early modern England and
China consistently had more surviving children than the poor.
It isn't unreasonable to infer that the rich had more children
in part because mothers and children were less likely to die
prematurely, for example, due to malnutrition, and that the
reversal in the number of surviving children per family was due
substantially to the fact that improved medical care caused
almost every mother to survive childbirth and almost every child
to live to adulthoo