I believe the traditional answer is that as birth rates tend to decline with birth control and lower poverty, we pursue those as best we're able. It's not as satisfying as saying people you don't like are too cowardly to admit they want genocide, but them's the breaks.

Yes, and we use that sort of equivalence all the time. Do you have any reason to suspect that our understanding of quantum mechanics is generally unreliable or flawed in a relevant way?