Despite the severe economic difficulties of the people, a senior IRGC official called on IRGC and Basij families to have at least 5 children.
In a situation where Iran is facing countless problems, including severe economic, social, and environmental crises, and the government has practically demonstrated its inability to provide for the most basic livelihood needs of the country's current population, and has put Iranian families under severe pressure by making controversial decisions such as rationing gasoline and tripling the price of free gasoline, various elements of the system continue to pursue a policy of population growth.
On Sunday, December 2, Ali Fadavi, deputy commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, criticized the fact that families only have two children, and stated that he himself has five children. He called more "childbearing" in Iran "an obligation" and said that the minimum number of children for Basij and Guard families should be five.
The issue of childbearing is related to the general family policies that Khamenei announced in 2016, and one of these policies was supporting "the growth of reproductive health and increasing childbearing" with the aim of increasing the Muslim population.
This is despite the fact that Iran's population is currently 83 million, and according to official statistics announced by the deputy head of the relief committee, 16 million people are said to be below the poverty line.
According to this statistic, currently only about four million people are covered by the relief committee, and according to estimates, if all people below the poverty line were covered to the extent of providing food, a budget deficit of eleven trillion tomans would arise.
In recent years, the Iranian government has suspended a highly effective family planning program through which people had access to free counseling, birth control, and even vasectomy.
Earlier, Amnesty International criticized Iran's policies on population growth and stated that the government's plans to stop providing family planning services in Iran not only set women's rights back by decades, but also constitute "human rights violations."
The widespread mismanagement and corruption in various elements and components of Iran’s governance structure have repeatedly been the target of severe criticism by US government officials and legislators. The United States has repeatedly condemned the institutionalized corruption and mismanagement, special spending and exclusive privileges for individuals close to power, violation of citizens’ rights, suppression of the people’s legitimate demands, plunder of Iran’s God-given assets, and ambitious regional and global warmongering of the leaders of the ruling regime in Iran, and has considered them to be among the main causes of the social, livelihood, welfare, economic, and financial problems of the Iranian people.
Source: Voice of America
