Family planning in Iran

Iran had a comprehensive and effective program of family planning since the beginning of the 1990s. While Iran's population grew at a rate of more than 3% per year between 1956 and 1986, the growth rate began to decline in the late 1980s and early 1990s after the government initiated a major population control program. By 2007 the growth rate had declined to 0.7 percent per year, with a birth rate of 17 per 1,000 persons and a death rate of 6 per 1,000. Reports by the UN show birth control policies in Iran to be effective with the country topping the list of greatest fertility decreases. UN's Population Division of the Department of Economic and Social Affairs says that between 1975 and 1980, the total fertility number was 6.5. The projected level for Iran's 2005 to 2010 birth rate is fewer than two.

In late July 2012, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei described Iran's contraceptive services as "wrong," and Iranian authorities are slashing birth-control programs in what one Western newspaper (USA Today) describes as a "major reversal" of its long standing policy. Whether program cuts and high-level appeals for bigger families will be successful is still unclear.

According to Dr Malek Afzali, Iran's deputy minister for research and technology in the Ministry of Health, before the Islamic Revolution, there was family planning but "people did not accept it."

The Tehran Declaration of 1967 claimed that family planning was a human right, and arranged for the creation of both a Family Planning Division as part of the Ministry of Health and a High Council for the Coordination of Family Planning. These programs were responsible for 2000 nationwide clinics distributing forms of birth control

Following the creation of the Islamic Republic; family planning clinics of the Shah were dismantled "on the grounds that Islam and Iran needed a large population." The Majlis passed many pro-natalist laws during this era,like the lowering of marriage age to nine years old for girls and fourteen years old for boys, the legalization of polygamy, the artificial inflation of birth control pill price from one hundred rials to one thousand rials per pack, and the creation of the Iranian Marriage foundation which provided newlyweds with furniture to ensure more people could get married and reproduce During the Iran-Iraq war between 1980 and 1988, a large population was viewed as a comparative advantage for Iran.

...
Wikipedia