ASBET KHALIL, Egypt -- This tiny, rural village beats slow with the rhythm of summer: Women shuck piles of corn, their daughters slosh clothes in a basin drawn from the river, cows nose inquiringly into the open windows of clay-brick homes.

And everywhere there are children.

Too many children, according to the government. Egypt has concluded it will never solve its problems -- poverty, illiteracy, underdevelopment -- unless it radically slows the growth of its people.

People such as Fatma Sayed Hassan. She's borne 15 babies. Every year, she would go to the terraced roof of her home to give birth -- "Laid them out like cats," she said. Two-thirds of them lived.

She stopped, says Fatma, 47, when "God gave me the best form of family planning: My husband died."

Egypt is pushing less drastic measures of birth control. Its successes, and shortfalls, reflect the mixed measures of the global population problem that will be heard at the International Conference on Population and Development starting tomorrow in Cairo.

On one hand, Egypt is making great strides in its population war. More than 48 percent of couples of child-bearing age now use contraceptives, double the rate of a decade ago. The average numbers of children per couple has dropped to 2.9 from 4.4 in 1985. Studies show the government's message -- that smaller families are better -- is universally heard and widely accepted.

"We are seeing success," says the Egyptian minister of population, Maher Mahran. "Today the population of Egypt is 59 million. If it weren't for our efforts, it would be 70 million."

On the other hand, Egypt's population is still swelling. It grows by a million every eight months. Even the wildest success of family planning would not stop growth until the middle of the next century. Anything short of that will leave Egypt's efforts to climb out of the Third World swamped by new mouths to feed.

"What overpopulation means in Egypt is a deteriorating quality of life," says Saad Eddin Ibrahim, a sociologist in Cairo. "It means the spread of malnutrition, shantytowns, poverty, violence, crime, and religious and political extremism."

Egypt is a desert country, almost entirely desolate and barren, except for the Nile Valley into which the overwhelming majority of the population is crowded. Along the life-giving Nile, the Egyptian countryside seethes with fertility. The very earth is hot, like a womb, and gives forth plants and crops in profusion. Everywhere there is the abundance of reproduction: Goats nose through garbage with their kids, geese noisily scold goslings, donkeys leave a trail in dung that breeds flies, which feed the birds. To preach curbs on fertility seems to rail against the rising sun.

Surprisingly, the most effective weapon is television. With help from the Johns Hopkins University, Egypt has used soap operas and one-minute dramas on television in its campaign.

Even in mud-brick homes of rural villages, there often is a television. Those who do not have a TV set watch at the local coffeehouses popular in Egypt.

"Ninety percent of the population watches television," says Phyllis Tilson Piotrow, director of the JHU Center for Communication Programs in the School of Public Health.

Television is used to combat the superstition, tradition and rumors that discourage birth control. In conservative Egypt, adults still blanch at frank talk about sex.

"I don't want to know what is happening inside me. It embarrasses me," says Kamala Ahmed, 27, a mother of four in Cairo. Does she discuss sex with her daughter? Her hands fly to her face as though to ward off danger.

"No, no," she says. "I would not tell her anything because it might open her mind too much. I do not want to open her eyes."

Hopkins advisers helped Egypt produce a soap opera, "And the Nile Flows On," in 1992. They created spot ads in which a harried mother of six confronts the cool and collected mother of two, or the kindly doctor convinces a man he is still virile without a squadron of sons.

"If you want to reach people and change their behavior, you can't just preach at them and lecture them. You have to entertain them," says Dr. Piotrow, who is in Cairo for the population conference.

It worked. Surveys showed women learned about contraceptives from television, and began to use them.

The rise in birth control "is absolutely, directly related" to the television campaign, says Jose G. Rimon, the JHU project director.

In a poor neighborhood of Cairo, Fawzia Mohammed, 39, has a television -- and little else. Her home is two bare, concrete rooms, undecorated but for the cracks in the walls. She lives here with her four children on what her husband gives her -- about $65 a month.

"You make do with what you have," she says with a shrug, reaching into her purse for a rumpled Egyptian pound to buy a Pepsi for her visitor. Hospitality is rich among the poor.

Outside her first-floor window, the squawk and hubbub of her neighborhood rise with the dust from its unpaved street. Ducks waddle hopefully toward puddles of sewage, hawkers chant the beauties of bruised pears and sticky grapes, butchers hack at the corpses of water buffalo hung on hooks.

Swarming throughout the scene are children -- dozens, hundreds, thousands -- their eyes bright with that secret humor of childhood. They have not yet noticed their own dirty clothes, nor the grayness of their homes, nor the bleak, black prospects of their futures.

Fawzia balked at adding more children.

"I had two girls, and I wanted to stop," she says, sitting on the bed that serves also as a couch. "But my husband said I had to have a boy. So we had another -- it was a girl. And finally a boy.

"My husband said he wanted another boy. But I said no. I'm going on the pill," she relates of her decision after the birth of Garib, now 5.

"He wanted more," she says. "He got angry, and there was a fight, and he went and married someone else.

"But now," she says, her placid face suddenly alight with wicked humor, "his other wife can't have any kids."

Delegates to the population conference will talk about "empowerment of women" -- giving women the choice of when and whether to have children. What seems like fairness to the West sounds alien here, where men make the decisions.

"The choice should be up to the man," says Gooma Abdel Kareem, a 33-year-old chicken seller who told his wife to go on the pill after their third child.

"The man is the one responsible," he explains. "He is the one who pays for everything. If the woman works, she can help. But it's the man who is ultimately responsible, so he should have the say."

At the Zahara family planning center, a government clinic in Cairo, Dr. Suhair Ibrahim says she often is talking only to the messenger when she counsels women on birth control.

"The women come in here and find out about all the different methods. Then they go home and explain them to the husband, and he chooses," she said. "The husband has the upper hand."

Eyba Ramia Awad is proof. She also lives in this rural village 25 miles north of Cairo. At 40, she appears young for the labors she has made. Her face is unlined, but her eyes are mournful. Like her neighbor Fatma, she, too, has had 15 babies and watched five of them die.

"My husband thinks birth control is against religion," says Eyba. She was married at age 13, a mother by age 15. "When I had seven children, I asked him to stop. I tried to give myself abortions. But he always said no.

"It has ruined my health," she said. "My knees give away. My hands hurt. I have low blood pressure. I always feel fatigued. Now, when I get pregnant, I get really sick.

"It's a big problem, and I fell into it," said Eyba, tears rimming her eyes. "I'm going to be in it for life."

Four miles away, on a straw mat in a mud house in the poor farm village of Asbet el-Adi, sits Omar Abdul Maksoud, 43. He echoes an argument that will be made in the air-conditioned halls of the population conference. Birth control is fine for the rich but won't do much for the poor, he said.

"The basic problem is work. The amount of people really doesn't matter. If we had enough work, it would be OK," he says. Omar has seven children; his wife is big with number eight.

"She thinks the more children, the more she has a grip on her man," he says good-naturedly. "She took the pill once and got fat as a cow, so she stopped."

Besides, he said, "God would not create a mouth and forget it."

In the waiting room of a family planning center in Giza, a suburb of Cairo, more than 40 women wait patiently to make sure God is relieved of the burden.

Many will be fitted with an intrauterine device. Oral birth control pills also are popular, as are injections every two or three months with Depo-Provera, a method only recently available for contraception in the United States.

Few condoms are used in Egypt. "The men don't like condoms, and they don't like to participate in birth control," said Dr. Ayman Abdel-Mohsen, medical director of the Egyptian Family Practice Association.

Abortion is illegal in Egypt except to save the life of a mother. But "it does happen a lot, illegally," acknowledged a Cairo physician, Dr. Zena Abdel-Malek.

Said one Cairo mother: "If I got pregnant again, I would get an abortion. If I couldn't do it legally, I would find someone to do it illegally."

Despite the government's education campaign, some archaic traditions persist. Most rural girls and many poor city girls -- the estimates vary widely -- are circumcised. Their genitalia are sliced off before puberty by a doctor, a midwife or sometimes a barber.

"Circumcision is good and clean," said a 27-year-old mother of four. "It was done to me. I did it to my daughter when she was 8. I did it so she does not have sexual excitement, so she does not get sexually excited before marriage."

So widespread is the practice, the government has not yet tackled it head-on. They have focused instead on encouraging smaller families.

Interviews in Cairo and the countryside suggest the message has worked -- sort of. To an extent surprising in a Third World country, people endorse birth control, but not necessarily after two children.

Maybe after three or four, they say, as long as that includes some boys.

"My brother wanted a son," said Gilal Abess, 26, in Cairo. "They have seven girls now. He is going to keep going until they get a son."

Outside a mosque in Cairo, Sayed Mohammed Shalan walked with his wife and their youngest child. "I agree with what the government says -- only two children," he said. But this was his fourth child, he acknowledged.

"It just happened," said his wife, Nadia Abdel-Aziz, breaking into giggles under her Islamic-style garb.