POPULATION: Go Forth and Multiply Ahmadinejad Tells Iranians

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Kimia Sanati

TEHRAN, Nov 10 2006 (IPS) - President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has once again stirred up controversy by opposing the country’s long-standing efforts at reducing the population growth rate and by his proposal to make female employees, with children, part-time workers on full salaries.

A number of parliament representatives are collecting signatures to grill the President for this as well as some of his other controversial and spontaneous statements and decisions.

“I am against those who say two children are enough (per family). Our country has the potential to raise many children. It can even have a population of 120 millions. The west is worried because their population growth is negative and they are afraid that our population will grow and we will prevail over them,” Ahmadinejad said at a joint meeting of the cabinet and parliament representatives on Oct. 22.

“My concern is that women’s presence in different arenas of the society may divert them from their main duty which is raising the future generation,” he also said, and added that the government was prepared to usher in a bill to reduce working hours for mothers in proportion to the number of children each has.

As criticism poured in, the cabinet spokesman was forced to explain that the statement did not mean a new policy was about to be framed and that the Presidnet only meant that the growth in population was not worrying and that the country was capable of meeting society’s needs. This was reiterated by the health minister who said implementation of the family planning strategy would continue, ‘Kargozaran’, a reformist daily, quoted him as saying.

Official interpretations were many and varied. A conservative female member of parliament, Fatemeh Rahbar, was quoted by the Aftab News Agency as saying that the ‘’main argument of the President is that the more the population of Muslims and Shiites, the more consolidated the Islamic state would become in the world.”

Maryam Behrouzi, another Ahmadinejad supporter who heads a traditionalist conservative women’s association, said the state policy to lower population growth rate in earlier years had to be revised in present circumstances. “God provides children’s subsistence, so what is wrong with having more children?” she was quoted as saying.

Criticism from the reformist camp was strong and even the hard line administration’s labour and social affairs minister was on record saying that people did not decide about family planning on the basis of what they were told to do and that population growth rate could even turn negative if people’s financial well-being was not properly secured.

“Increasing the population that much (20 million) is possible if people are only to walk and breathe, but we need to provide services to this population. The problems (we face in implementation) of many plans are the consequences of the population boom of the early years of the revolution,” ‘Etemad Melli’, a reformist newspaper, quoted conservative parliamentarian Ali Abbaspour Tehranifard as saying.

Iran’s population has grown from 36 million at the time of the Islamic Revolution in 1978 to nearly 70 million now, nearly 70 percent of which is under 30 years of age.

Following the Islamic revolution, the official family planning programme that had started more than a decade earlier became dormant. Having more children came to be considered a religious virtue by many. During the latter years of the war with Iraq the population growth rate reached a peak of 3.9 from 2.7 a decade earlier, and in the same year the government had to put family planning back on its agenda.

“In those days young men were killed by the thousands in war fronts. Nobody knew how long the war would go on. Naturally, a bigger population was seen more of a bonus than a problem. But problems were soon to surface. Schools, for example, had to work in two or more shifts. The population boom of those years is now at the root of many problems such as the huge unemployment problem, standing at 11.6 percent,” said an analyst in Tehran, asking not to be named.

With the endorsement of the founder of the Islamic revolution, Ayatollah Khomeini, the government plan to reduce population growth rate became official policy in 1988. There was some opposition from the religious establishments that considered using contraceptives as interference in the work of God and ministers had to travel to Iran’s religious centre, the city of Qom, to justify the plan.

The Law of Family Planning, ratified a few years later in 1993, stipulated that privileges granted to parents on the basis of other laws could no longer be applicable with more than three children per family. The privileges included maternity leave, nursery charges, insurance fees and food ration coupons.

Since 1988 free family planning services have been offered in public hospitals and in healthcare centres all around the country where counselling and free birth control methods like pills and condoms are available. Vasectomy and tubectomy operations are also carried out free of charge in all public hospitals and some private ones commissioned by the health ministry. Family planning is now taught as an independent course in high schools and universities and family planning counselling is compulsory before marriage.

The plan, evaluated as very successful by the United Nations, has brought the growth rate down. Just a few days after Ahmadinejad’s speech, Mohammad Madad, head of Iran’s Statistics Centre, said the rate had come down to 1.2, easing some of the pressure on various organisations such as education ministry, Aftab portal quoted him as saying.

“The President’s opposition to population growth control is quite understandable within his frame of mind, but the promise to reduce women’s working hours should be taken even more seriously. It is an attempt on the government’s part to decrease women’s share in employment and bring more men into the work force. The unemployment rate for women is already above 20 percent and if implemented, the policy can raise it even higher as employers will become even more reluctant to hire women,” the analyst said.