My sincere belief is that the change of reproductive patterns of women (and all associated social, human rights, and political change) is just a consequence of

My sincere belief is that the change of reproductive patterns of women (and all associated social, human rights, and political change) is just a consequence of economic growth and demands which it brings up. Change in mortality, on the other hand, obviously results from vaccinations. Western countries who invented both things (economic growth through division of labor and later, machines, and vaccines) have been lucky to keep both processes approximately in line with each other, thus avoiding population explosion (while even them didn't completely evade trouble). Then they brought vaccines (that are cheap) to developing countries out of their 'humanistic' values, but could not bring modern economy along with it. We see the result. Genie is out of the bottle - and there is nothing we could do. We cannot bring modern economy to these countries quickly. We cannot deprive them of vaccines, because they are cheap and they can even afford buying them without any foreign assistance. Trying to fix this with some sort of 'education for girls' before the economic stimulus (market demand for women to join the organized labor force) arrives resembles attempts by Russians to build communism by killing all capitalists and forcing everyone to work. They will call these attempts 'sinful' and 'brought by our enemies who don't respect our traditional way of life', and rightly so. All we can do it just sit and wait, that's my guess. Social change does not come by itself, or as a result of some external manipulation, it is always a product of change in productive forces.