The demographic foundations of our lives are deep and broad. Vital events impact all facets of human society, including if/when/whom we marry and sometimes divorce, the onset and pace of childbearing, and ultimately why and when we die. I take up questions of class, kinship and gender with the aim of understanding how reproductive inequalities are structured locally and across transnational boundaries. An ethnographic and demographic study of Bedouin women’s reproduction in the Bekaa Valley, Lebanon provides a new basis for understanding health inequality. Focusing on the demographic experiences of nomadic/seminomadic pastoral peoples in the Arab world marginalized from the dominant political economic structures of the nation-state provides a broader analytical lens from which to examine questions about the global “demographic divide”—the gulf in birth and death rates between rich and poor within and among countries. The contemporary population paradigm views social inequality through a narrow and distorted prism of fertility. High fertility in Arab-Islamic countries is frequently “diagnosed” as symptomatic of Arab “backwardness,” poverty and the alleged patriarchal subjugation of women. Given that one of the main hallmarks of modernity is the small nuclear family, the high fertility of Bedouin women in Lebanon, Syria and Jordan—among the highest fertility levels known to humanity at over nine children per woman—marks them as “premodern”. However, as I show in my work, high Bekaa Bedouin fertility is historically found in conjunction with moderate mortality, high nutritional status, and an overall lack of gender and class-like or occupational disparities in health. There is a high degree of social and demographic equality within Bekaa Bedouin society and other egalitarian communities that rely on kinship ties, sharing, and reciprocity. Class relations and class-specific demographic differentials are apparent at different scales—between Bedouins and Lebanese land-owning peasants in the region with Bedouins having higher fertility and mortality—prompting us to pay closer attention to the contingencies of geography and history when examining rich/poor divides. A central pillar of reproductive justice involves bridging class, race and gender divides, but must do so in ways that are not oppressive to nonwhite women in the Global South and metropole. The condemnation of high birth rates disparages the reproduction of poor rural women of color and perpetuates what bell hooks has dubbed “white capitalist patriarchy.”