December 13-2013
The government has now resorted to roadside billboards to try to convince husbands and wives to have more children—a major drive ordered by Supreme Leader Ali Khamenehi one year ago.
The theme of the billboard ads is that large families are happier and a single-child family is really unhappy.
Khamenehi ordered an end to all of Iran’s programs encouraging family planning and fewer children one year ago. The government has had a rather hyper approach to family size with Ayatollah Khomeini urging women to have many more children after the revolution, then reversing himself a half dozen years later when he saw he had been very successful and the country was being overwhelmed with more mouths to feed.
Khamenehi then reversed Khomeini’s policy last year when confronted with concerns that the great bulge in births in the 1980s would eventually retire with too few working-age people behind them to support them in their old age.
Cartoon-style posters advertising the benefits of producing many children are now appearing on major highways in Tehran as part of the effort to encourage couples to generate a baby boom and double the national population.
The colorful billboards are accompanied by the slogan: “One flower does not make a spring; More children, a happier life.”
One poster depicts a father and five jolly-looking children riding a bicycle in tandem. Peddling behind them are a father and his solitary son, both looking decidedly morose.
The mother is absent from the picture, presumably in keeping with Iran’s official position that women riding bicycles is “un-Islamic”.
Another billboard of a family rowing a boat does show a mother, paddling behind her husband and four children at the back of a canoe. That billboard also shows a disconsolate father in another canoe with only a solitary son.
Last year, Khamenehi said birth control policies should be reversed because they threatened to weaken the country by leaving it with an elderly population. Iran should aim to increase its population from its present level of around 75 million to 150 million, he said.
He did not address how Iran could produce enough food to feed that many people. It is state policy to make Iran self-sufficient in food because otherwise countries that export food would bully Iran, officials say.
The billboards have been produced by an organization, the House of Islamic Revolutionary Designers, that only came in to public attention a few weeks ago and is believed to be linked to the Pasdaran.
The group came into public view in October when it put up billboards attacking American honesty as part of a campaign against negotiations with the Obama Administration.
The posters, which included one showing a man representing a US negotiator accompanied by an attack dog, were removed after a few days when the city said they had never been approved.
