Garrett Nada,
assistant editor of The Iran Primer at the United States Institute of Peace,
has an excellent
piece on the gyrations in Iran’s family planning policy over the past three
decades. It was quite the roller-coaster. The piece has some revealing graphs
and pictures, which I have not reproduced. These excerpts give the main
picture:
Iran has a numbers problem. Over
the past 35 years, Tehran’s family planning policy has gyrated so
radically—from encouraging too many babies to producing too few—that the
Islamic Republic faces existential economic dangers.
The origin of the problem dates to the
1979 revolution. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini called on women to produce a new
Islamic generation for both cultural and security reasons. Khomeini wanted to
create a paramilitary force of 20 million religious volunteers to protect Iran
from foreign influence. Over the next decade, a baby boom almost doubled the
population from 34 to 62 million.
But the theocracy, drained by the costs
of the 1980-1988 war with Iraq, gradually realized that it could not feed,
cloth, house, educate and eventually employ the growing numbers. So with the
supreme leader’s approval, Tehran enacted one of the world’s most progressive
family planning programs to slow population growth.
The program broke many taboos in a
culture that favored large families. Clerics gave sermons on reducing family
size, while female volunteers were sent door-to-door to encourage women to have
fewer children. New billboards declared, “Fewer Children, Better Life.” Before
marriage, couples had to take family planning classes. Health centers dispensed
free birth control pills and condoms.
Ironically, the world’s only modern
theocracy was home to the only state-supported condom factory in the Middle
East, which reportedly produced 45 million condoms a year in 30 different
shapes, colors and flavors by 2006. The United Nations and population
organizations cited Iran’s program as a model for the Islamic world and
developing nations. The United Nations bestowed awards on Iranian practitioners
three times from 1999 to 2011.
The program worked. The fertility
rate plummeted—from 5.5 births per woman in 1988 to about 2.22 births in 2000.
But the initiative was almost too successful.
By 2006, the birthrate dropped to 1.9 births per woman—below replacement rate.
As a result, Iran’s population is aging. The average age is now 28.3 years. It
is expected to increase to 37 years by 2030, according to a U.N. projection. An
increasingly elderly and dependent population would heavily tax public
infrastructure and social services.
Last year, the government began debating
steps to prevent the kind of population crisis facing Japan, where sales of
adult diapers are expected to exceed baby diapers this year. So far, however,
the executive and legislative branches have not agreed on how to raise the
birthrate. Some lawmakers want to criminalize permanent forms of birth control,
while health officials and experts favor creating government incentives for
couples to have more children. . . .
The government introduced more
substantive changes in 2012, after Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei said the family
planning program had been “wrong” and “one of the mistakes” of the 1990s.
“Government officials were wrong on this matter, and I, too, had a part. May
God and history forgive us,” he said. “If we move forward like this, we will be
a country of elderly people in a not-too-distant future,” he warned.
Khamenei urged the
government to introduce measures to boost the population—now almost 80 million
— to 150 million or more. The Ministry of Health then pulled funding from the
family planning program and ended free vasectomies to encourage larger families.
It eventually replaced birth control classes with ones that urged having more
children.
In the spring of 2014, Khamenei
began pushing even harder for an increase in Iran’s fertility rate. “A country
without a young population is tantamount to a country without creativity,
progress, excitement and enthusiasm,” he warned on May 5, which is
International Midwives’ Day. . . .
Since Khamenei’s decree, the
government has reportedly added new incentives, which include lengthening
maternity leave, ensuring female job security after childbirth, and subsidizing
hospital care. In June, parliament debated controversial legislation aimed at
criminalizing male and female sterilization. The bill, approved by 143 out of
231 members of parliament in August, must be reviewed by the Guardian Council
to determine its compatibility with Islam.
But the bill has produced a
backlash from health officials and women’s groups. Mohammad Esmail Motlagh, a
senior health official, argued that the legislation would violate citizens’
rights. He instead called on lawmakers to use voluntary incentives to encourage
couples to have more children.
Reformists particularly fear major
changes to the family program could negatively impact women’s status,
especially in the workplace, where they are already underrepresented. Some 60
percent of university students are female, but only about 12 percent of the
workforce, according to the Statistical Center of Iran. Vice President for
Women and Family Affairs, Shahindokht Molaverdi, noted that no other country
has ever used punitive measures to increase fertility rates. She also warned
that outlawing surgical procedures could push contraceptive services
underground. . . .
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