You hold equal two contradictory ideas: in one hand, that the Global North has a greater level of material consumption than the Global South (true), and in the other hand that ‘better economic status’ will lower birth rates (assumed true). Of course, the conflict in these is obvious, isn’t it? If governments or philanthropists or the UN “lift girls out of poverty” in the ‘developing world’, they will consume at levels commensurate with their newfound wealth (which is to say, our Western wealth).
Moreover, the theory that to “improve funding for family planning services, to make condoms, birth control and abortion free and readily available”, even when coupled with other similar programs (subsidy for adoptions and the childless, “funding for aid organizations” and providing ‘family planning’) — all organized by the state, thus validating it — simply has not proven to work. Prayer has been going on just as long and with as much effect. One can easily say “It wasn’t done right” or it was underfunded, or similar excuses, disregarding the fact that reproduction is our biological imperative. We are driven to pair and be parents, and suppressing this (even your suggested measures are a soft, incentivized suppression) will predictably suffer from ineffectiveness. Being sufficiently effective will be considered harsh, oppressive, and certainly violate what are considered as human rights.
The threat of increasing population numbers is not really in dispute, but the immediate thought of responding to the problem is about which specific controlling, restrictive measures technoindustrial society would undertake to accomplish the goals. However, almost all of human history was lived pre-agriculture, before sedentary living in agrarian Civilization brought food surpluses which have delivered the immense human population growth *at the expense of biodiversity*. Ergo, the end of agriculture will allow humanity to live in a true balance with other species of flora and fauna, not simply converting them all to our kind (and those few deemed acceptable). When people have to work for their sustenance, when they don’t get excessive calories with ease, not only will less people be existing but less will be birthed.
Further education about ‘primitive’ cultures in Nature will demonstrate that they have physical and mental health which we in technological mass-society only dream of attaining via medications and professional therapists. Such are the gains of liberating modern man from technology, wellness in an infinitely sustainable natural world which our species is adapted to enjoy.
