March 25, 2022
Iran’s health minister says free maternity services will be offered to all pregnant women in the country as part of government’s efforts to encourage childbirth.
The measure is the latest in a multitude of initiatives taken by the regime in the last decade to overcome the reluctance of couples to have many children and to fulfill a decade-old directive from Supreme Leader Ali Khamenehi to strive for a population of 150 million so that Iran will be a more powerful nation.
Health Minister Bahram Eyenollahi said February 26 the country has been facing a declining rate in births in recent years. “[That] is not good for the country as our future needs a dynamic and energetic youth,” he told state broadcasting.
The minister said that free maternity care will also cover those families who have not paid into an insurance scheme in recent years.
Iran has introduced various schemes, including free housing and cheap bank loans, to encourage childbirth.
That comes as figures from the Statistical Center of Iran (SCI) show the fertility rate fell to the lowest ever in the year ending in March 2021 when the government agency put the fertility rate per woman at 1.6, down 0.2 points compared to the year before. It was 6.5 children in 1986.
The lowest fertility rate in the whole region of the Middle East and North Africa is now found in Iran.
While 1,594,000 births were registered in 1394 (March 2015-March 2016), the downward trend continued annually to the point that the number of births barely reached one million in 1399 (March 2020-March 2021).
Nicholas Eberstadt, the Henry Wendt Chair in Political Economy at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), wrote in an article in July 2020 that the fertility rate in Iran has dropped by 70 percent over the past 30 years, which he said was the largest decline in human history.
Eyenollahi also said the government has approved payments of up to 90 percent of the costs of infertility care.
The regime hopes that financial aid to couples will encourage childbirth, which has fallen below the replacement rate, meaning the country’s population will begin declining in a few decades.
Many analysts, however, say the bulk of the populace views their prospects for the future as being so poor that they do not want large (and costly) families.