I think it depends on how poor you are... if you can't even afford to feed yourself - don't have a child. I mean, heck, I won't even get a pet unless I know I'll be able to pay for vet care!

I chose not to have a child because I was diagnosed with cancer. Is it fair to have a child when you know you might die before he or she grows up? So it's not just poverty that rules out having a child...

All that being said - you can still have a child if you are "poor" - I've known people who raised healthy, happy children even though the kids had to wear hand-me-downs, ate a lot of beans and rice, etc.

I have a friend who adopted a little girl even though he and his wife earn very little. But the little girl has thrived - mostly because they spend time with her.

While they are technically poor, they make enough to cover the basics - food, shelter, etc. By the time she was 10 she was speaking conversational German, Italian and Russian as well as English, because her parents spent the time with her and noticed she had a gift for languages. Every night they read to her, they scrimped and saved so they could afford to send her to dance classes. They take her to state parks, concerts in the park, to the free days at museums - pretty much anything that is free.

In a lot of ways, she is much happier than a child with much wealthier parents who never spend time with their child...