August 9, 2019
Supreme Leader Ali Khamenehi has said increasing the number of children should become a central feature of Iranian society, calling on government officials to help families boost the population of the country. But a few days later, the government issued statistics showing the numbers of births is now falling precipitously.
In July 2012, Khamenehi halted the family planning program that Ayatollah Khomeini had put in place in the 1980s and ordered all programs geared to limiting births ended. He said Iran could be home to many more people and urged a goal of populating the country with 150 million people, double the current population.
He has been silent on how the country could support so many people under the severe water shortages the country now faces.
Since his decree, the regime has initiated programs such as baby subsidies to promote births. It has also mounted an advertising campaign that portrays families with many children as very happy and those with a single child as very sad. It has banned all birth control measures, including condoms, which used to be on sale everywhere.
Birth statistics show the campaign is not having much of an impact. The population growth rate actually fell from 1.29 percent before Kha-menehi’s order to 1.24 percent five years later. Many analysts say the poor state of the economy, including crowded living conditions, has far more impact on young couples’ decisions on child-bearing than state programs.
Days after Khamenehi renewed urging parents to have more children, the Supreme Council of the Cultural Revolution released statistics that showed the number of births has been falling and is now falling precipitously.
Persian Births %
year change
2015-16 1,570,000 —
2016-17 1,527,000 – 2.7
2017-18 1,480,000 – 3.1
2018-19 1,366,000 – 7.7
1st quart 299,000 -13.0
The last line is the number of births in the first quarter of the current Persian year (March 20-June 21, 2019) and the change from the same quarter last year.
According to the Kha-menehi’s website, he made his latest appeal for more babies at a meeting with young couples on the wedding anniversary of Imam Ali and Hazrat Fatemeh Zahra, the daughter and son-on-law of the Prophet Mohammad.
“Should the number of Muslims, whether in an Islamic country like Iran or in the [general] Muslim atmosphere such as the [international] Muslim Nation, be high, the ground would be prepared for development and sublimation,” he said.
“When a population is large, it necessarily features more competent people, and this ultimately contributes to a growth in available competencies,” Khamenehi remarked. On the other hand, “Small populations become subjugated.
Khamenehi cited the examples of China and India, which he said have come to boast many achievements thanks to their position as the two most populous countries in the world, with more than a billion people each.
In some Western countries such as the United States, he said, some families are found to have more than a dozen children. “They are encouraged [to bear more children], and no one reprimands them,” Khamenehi said. “When it comes to Iran, however, it’s the other way around and people are encouraged to behave conversely, namely to give birth to few children.
In truth, very few families in the United States have 12 children—or even six. The average number of children in an American family today is 1.9, down from 3.7 in 1960. (In Iran, it is even lower—1.8.) Only 15 percent of American women who are over 44 today, and thus beyond child-bearing age, have given both to four or more children.
Contrary to what Kha-menehi said, American women are not encouraged by the government to have more children because the size of the family is viewed as a personal matter and not the business of government.