The Politics of Reproduction in Iran: Transformations of Family Policies and Population Control in Iran

After two decades of a very successful and effective family planning, the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic harshly criticized the reproductive policies of the government since the 1990s. His concerns on the aging population as well as the decline of the family’s values and their negative impacts on the prosperity and development of the country led to the introduction of a series of pronatalist and family-oriented reproductive policies by the government since 2006. Nevertheless, it was not the first time that the biological reproduction in relation to the population dynamics had gotten special attention by the high ranked politicians and decision-makers in the modern history of Iran. In this context, this paper provides a historical account of how the population and reproductive practices of the families have been appeared and developed as a strategic means of the governing regime. In doing so, through reviewing the detailed governmental instructions, regulations, the national development plans, laws, and public debates, this paper traces the transformations of the reproductive policies of the modern state in Iran.
The historical study primarily reveals that reproductive practices became an important site of political contestations and therefore a strategic means of governing after the first national census (1956) when the census’s result triggered the rise of public concerns about the negative impacts of overpopulation and the importance of population control for advancing developmental policies. The global attention on the effects of overpopulation, at the same time, the domination of the discourse of development in social and economic planning, inspired by modernization theory and advocated by the technocrats of the plan organization in the late 1950s, along with the immediate social and demographic consequences of the shah’s White Revolution in the 1960s, made the population control not only as a strategic tool for controlling reproductive bodies, particularly women, but also as an essential development factor. This shift in family and reproductive policies of the state eventually led to the official introduction of family planning in 1967 and also had direct impacts on the enactment of the family protection law in the same year. Concurrently, in the realm of the social policies, the nuclear family slightly have evolved as a primary welfare unit and therefore as the regulative site of the state power from the 1960s onward.