276 Chapter Thirteen
foster a population increase. The war with Iraq was a major factor in
adopting a pro-natalist policy, especially the need for creating the ‘Twenty
Million Army’ proposed by Ayatollah Khomeini, the founder of the
Islamic Republic (Abbassi-Shavazi 2001: 1–2). The new policy caused the
population to rise from 34 million in the early1980s to 62 million in the
late 1980s (www.iranprimer.usip.org 13/08/2014). In 1989, Iranian officials
realized that the economy could no longer support a rapidly growing
population and hence enacted a family planning program (www.latimes.
com 22/07/2012). The new slogan ‘Fewer Children, A Better Life’ was
extensively advertised to encourage couples to limit their family size
(Mahdavi 2009: 165). Under the new policies, health centers offered free
contraceptives, and health workers provided counseling for marrying
couples on how to prevent unwanted pregnancies. Moreover, university
students had to pass a course called ‘family planning’. As a result, the
birth rate dropped to 1.8 per couple with a population of 77 million in
2009 (www.vancouversun.com 07/01/2014). In 2010, the then-president,
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, dismissed family planning, calling it an “ungodly
and a western import” (www.nbcnews.com 27/07/2014). Soon after, the
supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, who has final say over all policies,
raised the same concerns and invited all authorities to work out a
comprehensive plan to abandon the current single-child/two-child trend
and save the endangered future of the country (www.khamenei.ir 30/10/
2013).
Following the leader’s order to double the population, state funding for
birth control was cut off the budget and diverted to support the health of
pregnant women and newborns. The government also expressed its
support of the plan by offering financial incentives to large families
(www.bbc.co.uk/persian 01/08/2012).
Data and methodology
Data in the paper are divided into three categories. For the analysis of
Iranian officials’ remarks, I chose the ex-president, Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad and the supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, as the most
important decision makers in the political structure of the Islamic Republic
at the time when the Iranian government reversed its family planning
policy. Ayatollah khamenei’s statements on the topic of population
comprises 9 statements in total, collected from his website at http://www.
khamenei.ir by searching ‘population increase’ in the search box to find
relevant speeches. The speeches cover a period of one year from
10/10/2012 to 10/12/2013. As for the ex-president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, 5