Iran is urging people to have babies -- and making life hard for those who don't want to

[niyad]

Iran is urging people to have babies — and making life hard for those who don’t want to


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Nurse Zahra Akbarzadeh, left, gives baby Setayesh, just 1 day old, to her mother, Tayyebeh Sadat Bidaki, at the Mehr hospital in Tehran.
(Vahid Salemi / Associated Press)
By Omid Khazani
Sept. 14, 2022 3 AM PT
TEHRAN —

If you’re looking to make a baby in Iran, you won’t find a more willing, supportive and enthusiastic partner than the government. To encourage you to reproduce, how about a zero-interest loan? Or, if you’re a college professor, a promotion at the office? Maybe you want to buy a domestically made car — just have a child and see your name move up the waiting list. After years of preaching the virtues of birth control, the Islamic Republic is so eager for its people to procreate that it’s offering a range of financial and other incentives that have stirred up both amusement and outrage. Officials are desperate to reverse a declining birth rate that has fallen below the level necessary merely to hold the current population steady at 84 million. But the drive to engineer a baby boom also has its dark side, with the state intruding further into people’s private lives and interfering in their most intimate decisions. Just as many Americans are grappling with the conservative-dominated Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe vs. Wade, many Iranians find themselves faced with a hard-line theocratic regime intent on abolishing or severely restricting access to abortion and contraception.
Underground and unregulated clinics are proliferating for women seeking to terminate their pregnancies. Doctors risk revocation of their licenses if they provide such services. Abortifacient and birth-control pills, once cheap and widely available, are being peddled on the black market.

Despite its shrunken coffers, Tehran has allocated $660 million to encourage Iranians to bear children — and discourage those who are trying not to. It has set up a new office in the health ministry dubbed “Youthful Population,” a hopeful-sounding moniker that belies how gravely the country’s leaders view the graying of society and the problems that come with it, such as rising medical and social security costs. Critics say the government is failing to address the underlying reason for many couples’ decision not to have any, or more, children: Iran’s cratering, sanctions-hit economy, which has reduced millions of people to barely scraping by. “Most productive families are struggling with the high unemployment rate, housing problems, transportation, access to medical services and insurance, and yet they find themselves preached to by the officials who are responsible for the dire economic condition,” economist Habib Ramezankhani wrote on social media.

Iran’s fertility rate, or the average number of children women are having, is now 1.8, down from 2.5 a decade ago and well below the so-called replacement rate of about 2.1 — the level at which population remains static.
A street vendor waits for customer while selling clothes in southwestern Tehran, Iran, Tuesday, Nov. 2, 2021. As U.S. sanctions and the coronavirus pandemic wreak havoc on Iran's economy, suicides in the country increased by over 4%, according to a government study cited by the reformist daily Etemad. About 1 million Iranians have lost their jobs, and unemployment has climbed over 10% — a rate that is nearly twice as big among youths. (AP Photo/Vahid Salemi)


The steep drop is the result of previous governments having pursued exactly the opposite of today’s agenda. Worried that a persistent baby boom would severely strain the economy and the state, reformist administrations over the last 20 years encouraged people to have fewer children by making contraceptives and condoms inexpensive or free, subsidizing procedures like vasectomies and touting the benefits of a small family. Although abortion has never strictly been legal in Iran, lax enforcement made it relatively easy for women to seek the procedure or buy abortion pills with a doctor’s signature. Now, ultraconservative lawmakers have combined with the administration of hard-line President Ebrahim Raisi, who was elected last year, to criminalize the termination of pregnancies except in cases of rape, incest and risks to the mother’s life. Many officials speak of producing offspring as a moral duty, with Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei condemning those who don’t as indulging in a decadent bourgeois affectation.
“It is unacceptable that the lifestyle of the upper classes of society has been adopted by different classes, and that flashy weddings and not having children have become common,” Khamenei told a gathering of students in June.

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Iranian teachers holding young children in a Tehran kindergarten
Teachers hold young children in a kindergarten in Tehran.
(Vahid Salemi / Associated Press)

https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2022-09-14/iran-urging-people-have-kids-restricting-abortion-contraception