On Oct. 10, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei did something he had rarely, if ever, done: He admitted to making a mistake. During a speech in the Khorasan province, he said, “One of the mistakes we made in the '90s was population control. Government officials were wrong on this matter, and I, too, had a part. May God and history forgive us.”
After the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, Iranian officials introduced family-planning programs due to the high birth rates that resulted from the wartime population-growth policy. A successful subsidized program that included birth control and vasectomy clinics, among other services, was implemented nationwide. Slogans were created, including “Less Children, Better Lives” (which rhymes in Persian) and “Two Children is Enough,” to influence public opinion. The Minister of Health at the time, Alireza Marandi, received the 2000 United Nations Population Award for these efforts. Social factors also contributed to declining birth rates. With more females attending college, marriages and child births were both delayed.
Iran’s family-planning program went largely unchallenged until President Ahmadinejad began to criticize the “Two children is enough” slogan. In April of 2010, he also said that “the country has the potential for a population of 150 million.” These statements at first appeared to be empty rhetoric, but when Ayatollah Khamenei, Iran's Supreme Leader, made similar statements, analysts took note.
I spoke to UN Chief of Population Policy Vinod Mishra, who confirmed the Supreme Leader’s concerns about Iran’s declining fertility rates, which he described as “one of the most dramatic declines” in the world. He explained that Iran’s fertility rate is well “below replacement level,” which is approximately 2.1 children per family, where as Iran’s fertility rate is currently 1.7. This phenomenon is known as a “baby bust,” where each successive retiring generation will not be equally replaced with a new work force, straining government resources and putting excessive pressure on the labor force. Southern Europe and East Asian countries are also experiencing baby busts.
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