Iran had a comprehensive and effective program of family planning since the beginning of the 1990s. While Iran's population grew at a rate of more than 3% per year between 1956 and 1986, the growth rate began to decline in the late 1980s and early 1990s after the government initiated a major population control program. By 2007 the growth rate had declined to 0.7 percent per year, with a birth rate of 17 per 1,000 persons and a death rate of 6 per 1,000. Reports by the UN show birth control policies in Iran to be effective with the country topping the list of greatest fertility decreases. UN's Population Division of the Department of Economic and Social Affairs says that between 1975 and 1980, the total fertility number was 6.5. The projected level for Iran's 2005 to 2010 birth rate is fewer than two.
In late July 2012, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei described Iran's contraceptive services as "wrong," and Iranian authorities are slashing birth-control programs in what one Western newspaper (USA Today) describes as a "major reversal" of its long standing policy. Whether program cuts and high-level appeals for bigger families will be successful is still unclear.
History
Pre-revolutionary era
According to Dr Malek Afzali, Iran's deputy minister for research and technology in the Ministry of Health, before the Islamic Revolution, there was family planning but "people did not accept it."
The Tehran Declaration of 1967 claimed that family planning was a human right, and arranged for the creation of both a Family Planning Division as part of the Ministry of Health and a High Council for the Coordination of Family Planning. These programs were responsible for 2,000 nationwide clinics distributing forms of birth control
Khomeini Era and pro-natalism
Following the creation of the Islamic Republic; family planning clinics of the Shah were dismantled "on the grounds that Islam and Iran needed a large population." The Majlis passed many pro-natalist laws during this era, like the lowering of marriage age to nine years old for girls and fourteen years old for boys, the legalization of polygamy, the artificial inflation of birth control pill price from one hundred rials to one thousand rials per pack, and the creation of the Iranian Marriage foundation which provided newlyweds with furniture to ensure more people could get married and reproduce
Iran's population boom started before the 1979 Islamic Revolution (in 1976 the fertility rate was 6 children/woman). Data show that Iran's population doubled in just 20 years—from 27 million in 1968 to 55 million in 1988.
At one point in the 1980s estimates predicted that Iran's population would reach 108 million by the year 2006.
Rafsanjani era and decreasing natality
Following the war with Iraq, the death of Ayatollah Khomeini, and taking office of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani in 1989, a sharp change was made in Iran's population policy. Realizing "the costs of this burgeoning population were going to far exceed its capacity to provide adequate food, education, housing and employment", Iran's government "declared that Islam favored families with only two children", as one historian put it. Iran's Health Ministry launched a nationwide campaign and introduced contraceptives—pills, condoms, IUDs, implants, tubal ligations, and vasectomies.
In 1993, Parliament passed further legislation withdrawing food coupons, paid maternity leave, and social welfare subsidies after the third child for government and para-government employees. The backlash to this law was severe and application of it remains limited. Birth control classes were required before a couple could get married. Dozens of mobile teams were sent to remote parts of the country to offer free vasectomies and tubal ligations.
By 2001, an Iranian condom factory - the first of its kind in the Middle East - produced more than 70 million condoms a year, "packaged in French or English to suggest that they are imported", according to a foreign reporter. By this time Iran's population growth rate had dropped from an all-time high of 3.2% in 1986 to just 1.2%, one of the fastest drops ever recorded. In reducing its population growth to this level—a rate that is only slightly higher than that of the United States—Iran emerged as a model for other countries that want to lessen the risk of overpopulation. In 2007 Iran's Total Fertility Rate had dropped to 1.71 with a net out-migration of 4.29 ‰ (and population 65 M).
Explaining the change in religious doctrine on population during a birth control workshop in 1995, Deputy Health Minister Husein Malek-Afzali stated "Islam is a flexible religion".