"Well IF poor and uneducated people have too many babies, it would indicate that educating them and providing them with the means to avoid pregnancies would affect that... at least it makes sense to me."

Thats such a naive statement, Im not even going to touch it.

"First, it is certainly the child that suffers the most."

How is preventing a child from being born into poverty with no real chance to make a nice life for himself, making him suffer?

Explain to me how it is naive to think that sex-ed and access to contraception would lower birth rates.

I don't know if you're all tired of this, but anyway...

What I was getting at with my question about why the poor tend to have larger families than the middle classes is the historical reason, namely that if infant mortality rates are higher among the poor then they'll have more children to compensate.

"The infant mortality rate for Black infants continues to be 2.5 times that of White infants. Although infant mortality rates among Blacks and Whites have been on a continual decline throughout the 20th century, the proportional discrepancy between the Black and White rates remains largely unchanged."
Child Health USA 2003

I agree that people need to feel as if they're actively involved in their lives, rather than being spoon-fed by the state when they're capable of supporting themselves and their families, but if work doesn't pay more than welfare where's the incentive?

What's needed to get people off welfare and out of the poverty trap is entry-level jobs that pay significantly more than welfare, urban renewal/regeneration programs to improve the inner cities slums/ghettoes and an improvement in education for the poor.

But guess what? This is going to cost money, and lots of it too.