The contraception problem

No Muslim family should engage in birth control: Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan

The call by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan for Muslims everywhere to reject contraception completely and have more children as a consequence has had a mixed reception. He made the call on a live TV broadcast saying “no Muslim family should consider birth control or family planning”. He placed the onus for this development on women, especially those that were “well educated future mothers” not to use birth control in order to ensure the continued growth of the Turkish population. Mr Erdogan has previously gone as far as to term birth control an act of “treason”. The birth rate in Turkey has been dropping since 1980, with the fertility rate of 2.14 children per woman in 2015 compared to double that 36 years ago. This is just above the replacement level and the country has hovered at ZPG — zero population growth — for several years. Despite this, Turkey has one of the highest fertility rates in Europe and the UN Population Fund says that it has a substantial unmet need for family planning services, pointing to an alarming one-fifth of married women using abortion as a means of controlling their fertility.

What Mr Erdogan’s latest pronouncement on the subject displays is the still widespread anathema to family planning and contraception that exists in the Muslim world, which is fraught with problems of unemployment, poverty and conflict. It would be extremely unwise, nay disastrous, for the Muslim world at large to pay heed to Mr Erdogan’s advice. Coming to Pakistan, nobody knows for certain just how many people there are in the country as there has been no census since 1998, but an educated guess is at least 190 million, and that is on the conservative side. The population annual growth rate is 1.7 per cent (2012) and fertility well above replacement at 3.26 births per woman (2012) down from 6.6 in 1961. The very last thing this overburdened nation needs is more mouths to feed, educate and find jobs for. Mr Erdogan’s advice is best ignored.

Published in The Express Tribune, June 2^nd, 2016.

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