"this just struck me. is this confirmed by you personally? are you sure this is happening? i admit to being shocked. are you talking about baby squirrels sucking on the teats of a lactating feline mother?"

Feral cats are semi-social. Females will cooperate in raising their young (babysitting and possibly nursing the young of other females) to prevent males from killing their litters. It's apparent' altruism rather than true altruism (kin selection among related females)...maybe a little reciprocal altruism thrown in. That sort of behaviour seems easy to displace. Dogs and wolves are famous for it.

spatial

r/K is high birthrate/low investment, low birthrate/high investment right?

i mean the explanation that i've always heard for low birth rates in first world nations is that in an unstable, and often agricultural society, with no social security plan for older people the only hope of having a reasonably comfortable middle age is having a surviving adult male child. an adult female child won't work because she would go live with another family and support them. since instability and poverty are associated with high infant mortality rates and agriculture as an economic model requires workers in the family in general, this provides a practical impetus to have a lot of children. in first world countries without that economic model, the prosperity to earn enough money to support yourself independently, the possibility of having a comfortable old age based on that money and social institutions, low infant morality rates, high status of women allowing them to enforce contraception, the availability of safe and legal abortion, all combine to create lower birthrates.

"yes, and i wonder about this trend, if true. can the same conditions used in looking at r/K selection among our animal cousins help us look at birth rates among different groups of people? well, first we have to look to be sure you're right. it is interesting that among humans we don't see greater fecundity among the powerful, just a lot more influence and one would presume insurance for the safety and well-being of future generations of offspring. seems like it's temporal rather than spetial fecundity of a sort!"

You might be interested in this paper: Pettay JE, Helle S, Jokela J, Lummaa V (2007) Natural Selection on Female Life-History Traits in Relation to Socio-Economic Class in Pre-Industrial Human Populations. PLoS ONE 2(7):e606.

ABSTRACT:
Life-history theory predicts that resource scarcity constrains individual optimal reproductive strategies and shapes the
evolution of life-history traits. In species where the inherited structure of social class may lead to consistent resource
differences among family lines, between-class variation in resource availability should select for divergence in optimal
reproductive strategies. Evaluating this prediction requires information on the phenotypic selection and quantitative genetics
of life-history trait variation in relation to individual lifetime access to resources. Here, we show using path analysis how
resource availability, measured as the wealth class of the family, affected the opportunity and intensity of phenotypic selection
on the key life-history traits of women living in pre-industrial Finland during the 1800s and 1900s. We found the highest
opportunity for total selection and the strongest selection on earlier age at first reproduction in women of the poorest wealth
class, whereas selection favoured older age at reproductive cessation in mothers of the wealthier classes. We also found clear
differences in female life-history traits across wealth classes: the poorest women had the lowest age-specific survival
throughout their lives, they started reproduction later, delivered fewer offspring during their lifetime, ceased reproduction
younger, had poorer offspring survival to adulthood and, hence, had lower fitness compared to the wealthier women. Our
results show that the amount of wealth affected the selection pressure on female life-history in a pre-industrial human
population.

well here's the wiki.

he won the nobel prize in economics for showing how famines are/can be caused by inequalities built into distribution rather than lack of food. in particular he demonstrated that during the bengal famine in 1943 where 3 million people died there was enough food in india to prevent the famine.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amartya_Sen

i think the point is that education is useless without the economic and social capacity to implement it. and also rather patronizing, assuming that the poor and the brown can't manage their own bodies without the help of middle aged white people coming in and teaching them about birth control.

but regardless the point that comprehensive sex education, and access to life management resources like condoms, birth control, and legal and safe abortion are important stands. this is of course taking place in the context of religious fundamentalists in america exporting their sex-negative stupidity to the rest of the world through cutting off funding to aid programs that don't tow their anti-abortion, sex negative, party line.