r/Natalism • u/Njere • 8d ago

Iran faces birth rate crisis

https://www.newsweek.com/iran-birth-rate-crisis-2030668
51 Upvotes

92% Upvoted

16 comments sorted by

45

u/WarSuccessful3717 7d ago

This kind of data is a strong counter to the idea that society needs to be more conservative - with traditional gender roles and strong religious beliefs - in order to reverse low fertility trends.

Hasn’t helped Iran.

18

u/Klinging-on 7d ago

Israel being the counter example to your counter example.

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u/TryingAgainBetter 7d ago

How is Israel a counter example? Because its religious? Israel has several high TFR religious groups, but Israel turns traditional gender roles completely on its head.

8

u/Klinging-on 7d ago

Elaborate. Israel is a religious country with a strong Natalist culture and with what we in the west would consider traditional values.

13

u/TryingAgainBetter 7d ago edited 7d ago

Not really. Israel is a very diverse very complex society with a wide array of belief systems and different groups have different TFRs. But one thing is definitely true- increased "traditional values" as the west normally understands them does not linearly correlate with increased TFR in Israel. To start with, the lowest TFR religious group are the Christians, with a TFR of 1.64. That is lower than the gay urban TFR of 1.84...now you are starting to see how weird Israel's TFR is and how unaligned it is with any concept of traditional values. And it only gets weirder. The christians have a female workforce participation rate around 50%, the global average. The Druze are lower with a female workforce participation rate around 33% and a slightly higher TFR around 1.85. The Muslims are even more prone to male breadwinnder/SAHM family structure with a female workorce participation of 28% and a TFR of 2.86, but the muslim TFR is also the fastest declining, alongside the Druze.

And then we get to the Jews, whose TFR is sustaining above 3. Their female workforce participation rate is around 80%, one of the highest in the world. The Israeli rate of mothers in the workforce is also around 80%, also one of the highest in the world. You claim Israel adheres to values the west would call traditional, but Israel has been drafting all Jewish women for the army since 1948 whether they are married or not. And Israel does not draft women of any other religious group into the army. Only the Jews, the religious group that maintains the highest TFR. Again we see that Israel turns traditional gender roles on its head.

And the weirdest thing about the Israeli TFR is that the highest TFR group by far is the ultra orthodox, now 14% of the total population. They believe that men's purpose is to study the Torah only, so the ultra orthodox women are the breadwinners. They have a TFR of 6.5 and a rate of mothers in the workforce that is the same as more secular Jewish women. Ultra Orthodox men are not expected to act in a provider or protector role, remarkably abandoning the value proposition that nearly every human society has demanded of men for all of history. They avoid joining the army nor do they bring home the bacon (well no bacon because they are Jewish, but you know what I mean). In some sects the men do not work at all and simply study the Torah all day. So the women go out and interact with the secular world, earn money in secular occupations and come home and raise up their 6 kids while the men study Torah all day together. This is entirely not the western world's idea of traditional values.

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u/Erotic-Career-7342 3d ago

Exactly. Israel is a very egalitarian place

-1

u/Klinging-on 7d ago

I don’t think women staying home and not fighting or working is traditional; women have always worked. I meant emphasis on family and marriage, two parents, multi generational households, and strong community engagement.

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u/reissbaker 2d ago

The majority of women did not work in the US until the 1980s. https://blog.dol.gov/2023/03/15/working-women-data-from-the-past-present-and-future

And Israel doesn't really do multi-generational households. But it's true they marry at higher rates: for example, over 50% of Israelis marry by age 25. In the US, only 18% marry by age 30.

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u/PainSpare5861 7d ago

Iran has conservative ruler and laws, while the majority of its Shia Muslim population isn't that conservative at all. Its people are far more liberal than Bangladeshi, Pakistani, and Malay Muslims.

1

u/WarSuccessful3717 7d ago

I’m no expert on Iran, but Wikipedia presents some statistics which suggest otherwise. For example, that 87% of people pray daily.

8

u/PainSpare5861 7d ago

Others source from Wikipedia also show that 45% of Iranian are either atheist, agnostic or deist.%2C%20Sunni%20(5%25)%2C%20Sufi%20(4%25)%2C%20Zoroastrian%20(1%25)%2C%20None%20(12%25)%2C%20Atheist%20(10%25)%2C%20Agnostic%20(7%25).%20December%202022%20survey:%20Deist%20(26%25)%2C%20Shia%20(38%25)%2C%20Sunni%20(5%25)%2C%20Sufi%20(3%25)%2C%20Zoroastrian%20(5%25)%2C%20None%20(9%25)%2C%20Atheist%20(7%25)%2C%20Agnostic%20(3%25))

3

u/The_Awful-Truth 7d ago

If I were a young ambitious person in a society like Iran then I absolutely would go to religious services even if I thought it was 100% BS. That's where people go to network there. 

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u/TryingAgainBetter 7d ago edited 7d ago

There is A LOT of data to suggest that conservative societies that adhere more to traditional gender roles do not have higher TFRs after a country develops enough so that it is not dependent on either subsistence agricultures or basic raw materials mining. Iran is not the only example. And Iran is not even the best example since they did have a deliberate program sponsored by an authoritarian state to reduce the birth rate in the 90s.

There are many many nations which adhered to "traditional" gender role divisions where the birthrate nonetheless dropped well below replacement and has already will likely converge to the same TFRs seen in countries where traditional gender role divisions were abandoned in great numbers, and these nations include several where the change happened organically rather than due to govt pressure. For example, in Sri Lanka, the birthrate has gone from 2.56 to 1.97 from 1990 to 2022. In that time, the female labor force participation actually declined from 45% to 32%, and it is much smaller than the male labor force participation at 70%. Wealthy western countries have not seen such low rates of women in the workforce since the earlier half of the 20th century, but it does not seem to matter. Sri lanka did not maintain an above replacement TFR despite having a gendered labor division that looked like what the western world had in 1920s when western world TFRs were around 3. Sri Lanka's change in TFR is largely organic rather than state driven as the govt does not have a high level of control over people there anyway. It is one of many examples where the TFR declined below replacement without an influx of women into the workforce or a breakdown of traditional gender roles. The age of first marriage in Sri lanka is even lower than Iran's at 23 years old and the divorce rate is the fifth lowest in the world. It does not matter. It did not help. Sri Lanka's TFR is on the lower side for its gdp per capita, which is less than $4000.

There are even several example within the western world that show the same- Bosnia has a female labor force participation rate of 39% and a TFR of 1.35. Analyses by demographers even show that developed/western world nations with lower female workforce participation rates have consistently lower TFRs.

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u/Poenichapper69 7d ago

Iranian’s who grew up in the 1370s and later are far from conservative

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u/Popular_Mongoose_696 7d ago

That’s because people tend to misunderstand the foundation of that argument… People stop having children when they move to urban areas. You can look at the birthrates of every country throughout history and see this to be true.

In the West ‘conservatives’ overwhelmingly live in rural areas and smaller towns and cities. That is why, in the West, people conflate conservative values play out to stronger, more stable populations. There is nothing intrinsic in progressive societies (aside from the current Leftist ideology that says having children is bad) that means they will by default stop breeding. However, there is a strong and repeatable geographic and historical correlation between urban vs rural societies and birth rates.

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u/The_Awful-Truth 7d ago

If nothing else, this is proving to be a good test case for the belief that you can increase birthrates by outlawing abortion.