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.