Iran is Making Life Hard For People Who Don't Want Babies

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. 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.

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.

Some of the government's inducements for childbearing have invited ridicule and criticism, such as making family expansion a factor for university professors to climb up the academic ladder.  The government also wants employers, both public and private, to give new parents nine months of fully or partially paid maternity leave, which many companies complain is impossible given the collapsed economy. Even the offer of zero-interest loans to young people willing to have kids has had an unintended harmful consequence: a rise in underage girls being forced to marry men eager to take advantage of the offer.

Besides the government’s carrots are its sticks, whose increasing variety and use — especially against women — have grown more ominous.  The Health Ministry is piloting a website to register women in the early stages of pregnancy, to make abortion without government knowledge almost impossible.  Pregnancy screening to detect fetal abnormalities is now inaccessible to most Iranians because of its high cost — about $400 — and the decision whether to abort an unhealthy fetus is expected to be taken away from doctors and put in the hands of judicial committees.  The number of babies born with blood disorders has also risen sharply.  There have even been reports of officials being dispatched to hospitals to check on women scheduled for surgery to remove their ovaries, to ensure that the procedures are medically necessary and not for reasons of reproductive choice.

Even Iranian men have begun telling stories of difficulty and danger in maintaining autonomy over their bodies.  A 42-year-old civil servant and father of two told the Los Angeles Times that he underwent a vasectomy because the cost of living for a family of four had become crippling. The process was shrouded in subterfuge.  “I had to pay extra money and bribe clinic officials to make fake documents showing I was doing a reverse vasectomy,” said Ehsan, who, like Venous, asked that his last name not be used.

“In college, we were bombarded by various population control courses, and it was widely advertised that, after one or two children, the best option is to go through vasectomy, which was absolutely free of charge,” he recalled.  Besides vasectomies, condoms are no longer available for free or at a nominal cost from health centers. The cheapest price on the market for a packet of six is now $2. That’s out of reach for many Iranians.  But so is the cost of actually having and raising a child, making the government’s new pro-progeny message a tough sell.