The baby boom being promoted by Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei is likely part of a broader and potentially ineffective strategy to address the mounting economic and social pressures expected from the Islamic Republic’s rapidly aging population, experts told The Jerusalem Post on Sunday.
Much like his father and predecessor, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Mojtaba Khamenei has seemingly pushed for an increase in marriage and birth rates across the Islamic Republic.
He presented such measures as an essential step in making the Islamic Republic an “influential power,” according to a letter reportedly penned by Khamenei last week, according to state media.
On the same day he was reported to have penned the letter, Khamenei posted on X/Twitter, “By earnestly pursuing the correct, necessary policy of population growth, the great Iranian nation will be able to play a major role and experience strategic leaps in the future, taking long strides toward building the new Islamic-Iranian civilization.”
While other countries have invested in social benefits to encourage greater birth rates, Tehran has seemingly focused on seeing couples wed as an act of national pride in recent weeks.
Tehran has hosted several state-sponsored mass weddings for hundreds of couples, with photos of Khamenei strategically located above the stage of the large gatherings.
Additionally, Fars News Agency reported that matchmaking stalls had been a permanent fixture at the nightly pro-regime rallies across the country.
“Families come here looking for a good future for their children,” a woman overseeing one of the stalls said in comments published by the IRGC-affiliated outlet. “We try to make marriage easier by reducing expectations.”
Iran Health Ministry deputy warns of falling birth rate
The same day Khamenei’s letter was published, the semi-official IRGC-affiliated Tasnim News Agency reported that Alireza Raisi, the Health Ministry’s deputy for public health, warned that Iran’s birth rate had fallen to 1.35 children per woman.
An aging population, alongside war and the country’s worsening economic and environmental challenges, may make it difficult for Iran to raise its population growth enough to match or exceed the rising death rate.
Dr. Raz Zimmt, the director of the Iran and the Shi’ite Axis research program at the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS), explained to the Post that the regime spent much of the 1980s and 1990s encouraging the use of birth control to curb the unsustainable baby boom that followed the Iran-Iraq war.
Unemployment, economic strain, and a lack of resources meant the sudden population burst was unsustainable at the time.
Around 15 years ago, Ali Khamenei realized that the population was aging and that the Iranian economy would suffer due to both the lack of workers and a resource shortage to provide for the elderly, Zimmt continued.
While Khamenei may now push for a baby boom, Zimmt hypothesized his efforts would be barren. The younger generations in Iran are prioritizing education over having large families, and the economic crisis is making many lean against having larger families they cannot financially support.
Ben Sabti, an Iran expert and researcher at INSS, added that the regime has made several financial promises to encourage couples to have children, but it hasn’t followed through on the vast majority of them.
Iran fails to meet Family Support and Youthful Population Law commitments
Iranian MP Fatemeh Mohammadbeigi, deputy chair of the parliament’s Health Committee, reportedly complained only last week that Iran had not met 15% of the commitments it promised under the Family Support and Youthful Population Law passed in 2021.
The law promised interest-free loans for marriage, state land, housing discounts, utility subsidies, and increased childcare benefits from workplaces. It also restricted access to abortion and banned the free distribution of contraception.
“People know that there is no money for them, there is no loan, and there is so much corruption, so they don’t have children,” Sabti explained.
Sabti added that the restricted freedoms, such as the ban on elective sterilization procedures in 2010, had a counterproductive effect.
“The people don’t want to bring kids [into this type of society], so the regime actually made it worse… People go and live together, but they don’t marry,” he said.
“Nobody wants to get married because of the very bad economic situation today. Of course, after the wars, it’s much worse,” he concluded.