Iran has launched a house-to-house healtheducation drive to persuade couples to have more children in a move aimed at engineering a baby boom and more than doubling its population.The health ministry is deploying some 150,000 officers to promote the benefits of marriage and urge single-child couples to expand their families.
Medical faculties in the country's universities have also been instructed to introduce courses on increasing the population, which will be closely monitored by health ministry officials.
The initiative reverses a 20-year state-sanctioned birth control policy that afforded easy access to a range of contraceptive measures including vasectomies and condoms and provided statutory family-planning to newly-weds.
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran's supreme leader, ordered the abolition of the 10 billion family planning budget last year after labelling the policy a mistake and calling for the country's population currently around 75 million to rise to 150 million.
Mohammad Ismail Motlagh, general manager of the health ministry's family, school health and population programme, said the main goal was to encourage couples to avoid producing single-child families, which he said was leading to "social and emotional problems".
"In the marriage training course, we have focused more on the child-producing because the single-child issue has caused so many problems and provoked much debate," he told the semi-official Fars news agency.
"For this reason, I am suggesting that families should have more than one child and reduce the gaps in pregnancy to only two years. If the pregnancy gaps exceed two years, couples should revise their methods and make plans in this regard."
Iran originally introduced family planning following a population explosion in the wake of the 1979 Islamic revolution. The programme has been criticised by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has said it weakened the country ability to compete with the West.
By The Telegraph
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