Peace Without Poison

international community. As the graph below shows, until the beginning of the 21 st centuryhardly anyone used contraceptives in Swaziland yet fertility declined from almost 7 to 4.3children per woman. Even today, when 50% of Swaziland’s population purportedly usescontraceptives, the fertility decline to 2.9 children per woman cannot possibly be explained bycontraceptives.Abortion is a non-factor in Swaziland’s fertility decline since it is illegal and performed only tosave the life of the woman.As elsewhere in the world, Swaziland’s rulers have been rewarded for poisoning their peopleinto sterility with rising prosperity. No sooner did fertility begin declining in the 1980s thenprosperity began rising. And the real explosion in GDP did not happen until fertility declinedsubstantially, from 7 to 4 children per woman, by the turn of the century.The folks at the UN would be hard-pressed trying to explain how a poor country like Swazilandwith a nominal GDP per capita of less than $3,500 per capita could possibly experience such adrastic fertility decline in the absence of affluence, which has always been touted as aprecondition for low fertility.Swaziland is in stage three of the demographic transition.797 | P a g e