During the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, births soared in Iran with the full encouragement of Ayatollah Khomeini who wanted a very populous Iran. But in the late 80s, demographers convinced Khomeini that the soaring birth rate threatened to choke the economy and undermine the country.
Khomeini then turned on a dime, telling Iranian families to have fewer children. Khomeini said birth control measures such as condoms and intrauterine devices were fully compliant with Islam. He even endorsed vasectomies.
Most stunningly, the government ordered that all couples planning to marry must take a one-hour, state-administered course in birth control before their nuptials. The lectures are very graphic.
With Khamenehi’s decree reversing state policy, it is assumed those lectures will now become part of history.
Khamenehi said the country’s birth control policies are “wrong.” He said that 20 years ago they made sense, but “their continuation in later years was wrong.”
He said, “Scientific and expert studies show that we will face population aging and a reduction in population if the birth control policies continue.”
Actually, Iran’s population would continue to grow for years even with the current birth rate because there are so many women born during the birth surge who are still having children. But eventually, those children and their children would have fewer babies so that eventually Iran would suffer a birth dearth, something that has been happening all across Europe.
The United States and Canada both have low birth rates, but they are not facing a population decline because both continue to accept large numbers of immigrants.
Khamenehi acted just after the latest census figures showed that Iran’s annual rate of population growth had fallen from 3.9 percent at its highest in the late 1980s and 1.6 percent as recently as the 2006 census to just 1.29 percent in last year’s census.
The government lost no time in dismantling its birth control programs.
Mohammad-Esmail Motlaq, a Health Ministry official, told the daily Sharq that all family planning programs that were contained in the budget passed just a few months ago by the Majlis have been scrapped.
It remains unknown what impact the death of officially encouraged birth control will have. Families all over the world once had lots of children partly because so many died in infancy and partly because children were an economic benefit—they provided labor for the family farm and they were expected to take care of their parents in old age.
That has all changed. In the modern world, children are an economic burden, not an economic benefit, for families. Married couple still want children, but in most developed countries they want just one or two.
In Iran, high unemployment, housing shortages and bleak prospects for the future have all contributed to the low birth rate. Men and women now marry at a much later age because of the economic challenges of setting up a household and thus have fewer children. None of that will change with the new policy on birth control.
Thus, the end of family planning in Iran and official encouragement of big families may not make much of a difference. It will be a few years before anyone knows what the impact of Khamenehi’s decision is.
President Ahmadi-nejad has been arguing for an end to family planning ever since he took office in 2005. So, his government is certain to do its best to carry out Khamenehi’s new decree.
But more important than Khamenehi’s and Ahmadi-nejad’s preferences are the preferences of married couples like Abbas Kazemi, a doorman at a private office building in Tehran. He told an Associated Press reporter he can’t afford more than two children on his salary of 4.2 million rials ($215) a month. “I cannot afford daily life,” he said. “I have to support my wife and two children as well as my elderly parents.”
Throughout the world, Iran has been widely lauded for its remarkable success in reducing population growth. UN agencies often sent family planning staffers from other countries to see what Iran was doing.
Ahmadi-nejad, however, has always wanted to go in the other direction. Three years ago, he proposed making payments to every family for every child they have in an effort to encourage more children. The Majlis didn’t go along with that. But with Khamenehi’s new decree, it might now agree.
Child payment programs are common in Europe. Canada has such a program, but the United States does not.
Deputy Health Minister Ali-Reza Mesdaqi-nia condemned birth control as “a thing of the past.”
He said, “There is no plan to restrict the number of children per family to one or two. Families should decide on that by themselves. In our culture, having a large number of children has been a tradition. In the past, families had five or six children…. That culture still exists in rural areas. We should go back to our genuine culture.”