The Fertility Transition in Iran: Revolution and Reproduction

213 Pages·2009·3.511 MB·English

by  Mohammad Jalal Abbasi-Shavazi, Peter McDonald, Meimanat Hosseini-Chavoshi (auth.)

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The Fertility Transition in Iran:
Revolution and Reproduction
Mohammad Jalal Abbasi-Shavazi
Peter McDonald Meimanat Hosseini-Chavoshi
●
The Fertility Transition
in Iran: Revolution and
Reproduction
Mohammad Jalal Abbasi-Shavazi Peter McDonald
Department of Demography Australian Demographic
Faculty of Social Sciences and Social Research Institute (ADSRI)
University of Tehran Australian National University
Tehran Iran Canberra
[email protected] Australia
[email protected]
Meimanat Hosseini-Chavoshi
Department of Family Health & Population
Ministry of Health and Medical Education
Hafez Avenue Tehran
Iran
[email protected]
ISBN 978-90-481-3197-6 e-ISBN 978-90-481-3198-3
DOI 10.1007/978-90-481-3198-3
Springer Dordrecht Heidelberg London New York
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Preface
Confounding all conventional wisdom, the fertility rate in the Islamic Republic of
Iran fell from 7 births per woman in 1979 to 1.9 births per woman in 2006. That
this, the largest and fastest fall in fertility ever recorded, should have occurred in
one of the world’s few Islamic Republics demands explanation. This is the purpose
of this book.
Conventional wisdom has been that falls in fertility in developing countries are
gained slowly and only in open societies, particularly those open to the western
notion that rapid population growth is an obstacle to economic development. The
‘western package’ of development, promoted by organizations such as the World
Bank and the International Monetary Fund, combines economic reforms including
abolition of tariffs, removal of currency controls, private foreign investment, trans-
fer of technology and human capital enhancement with aggressive, government-
sponsored family planning programs. Japan provided the first apparent evidence of
the appropriateness of this development model and it was followed by other Asian
success stories such as South Korea, Singapore, Thailand, and Indonesia. The
Islamic Revolution ensured that this ‘western package’ was not implemented in
Iran yet fertility has fallen just as fast if not faster than in those countries where the
package was applied. In this book, we address how this occurred.
Various questions have been raised regarding the Iranian fertility transition.
What are the reasons for the fall of fertility in Iran? What are the processes
through which fertility has fallen? What is the relative importance of social,
e conomic and cultural influences and what has been the role of the family plan-
ning program? What are the reasons for the similarity of fertility trends across
provinces and in both urban and rural areas? What is the future of fertility in Iran?
Will it continue to decline or will it rise again in the future? All these questions
are addressed in this book.
We use various datasets including the 1986, 1996 and 2006 Censuses and the
2000 Iran Demographic and Health Survey (IDHS) to examine fertility trends over
the last three decades. However, the main findings in the book are drawn from the
2002 Iran Fertility Transition Survey (IFTS) and the 2005 Iran Low Fertility Survey
(ILFS) which were specifically designed and implemented to examine socio-
economic and cultural determinants of fertility and the dynamics of contraception
in Iran.
v
vi Preface
The book is divided into ten chapters. The first chapter presents the theoretical
framework for analysing fertility decline in Iran. The second chapter discusses pre-
and post-revolutionary population policies in Iran, and sets out the context within
which the fertility decline has occurred. Chapter 3 presents the broad evidence of
fertility trends and patterns in Iran up to 2006. Chapter 4 provides a more detailed
analysis of fertility trends using parity progression ratios. Chapter 5 deals with
marriage change as one of the main proximate determinates of fertility, and exam-
ines the extent to which transformation of marriage has contributed to the fertility
decline in Iran. Chapter 6 focuses on the trends, levels and patterns of contraceptive
use across time, while Chapter 7 uses the unique dataset from the ILFS on the full
history of women’s contraceptive use, and provides important insights into the
changing contraceptive behaviour of successive generations of Iranian married
women. This chapter provides a parallel to Chapter 4 that examines the birth histo-
ries of women across their lifetimes. Chapter 8 provides a cohort perspective on
changes in attitudes related to family and fertility behaviour. The chapter discusses
to what extent transformation of attitudes toward family and fertility paved the way
for the later success of the family planning program and the phenomenal fertility
decline in Iran in recent decades. One of the main features of social change in post-
revolutionary Iran is the improvement of women’s status within an Iranian–Islamic
context. Addressing questions arising from the theories of gender equity and
women’s autonomy, Chapter 9 discusses how and to what extent the improvement
of the status of women in Iran has been linked with contraceptive use and fertility
decline. The final chapter reviews the applicability to the Iranian case of the various
theories that have been developed to explain the fertility transition, and presents our
expectations for the future of fertility in Iran.
This is a comprehensive book and is based on a decade of research collabora-
tions by the authors. It applies theories and hypotheses of fertility decline in
explaining the sharpest fall of fertility ever recorded. The book is also rich in data
as well as the application of different demographic methods to interpret the data. It
offers guidelines for the future of fertility in Iran. We recommend the book to not
only demographers and social scientists (sociologists, anthropologists and econo-
mists), but also to those who are interested in social and demographic changes in
Iran and other Islamic countries in the Middle East. It is also a useful reference for
demography students and researchers who are interested in applying fertility theo-
ries in designing surveys and analysing data. Finally, the book would be of interest
to policy makers who are interested in the past and future of demographic transition
in Iran.
Tehran and Canberra Mohammad Jalal Abbasi-Shavazi
May 2009 Peter McDonald
Meimanat Hosseini-Chavoshi
Acknowledgements
This book is a product of a fruitful collaboration by the authors for a decade. We
are indebted to many institutions, universities, and individuals whose contribution,
support and comments have been instrumental for the completion of this book.
The Department of Demography of the Faculty of Social Sciences along with
Division of Population Research of the Institute for Social Studies and Research of
the University of Tehran and the Demography and Sociology Program (now the
Australian Demographic and Social Research Institute – ADSRI) of the Australian
National University have been the main institutions where the collaborations
between the three authors have taken place. The authors met frequently in Tehran
and Canberra and benefited from the stimulating and scientific environment at the
two universities. We would have not been able to complete the manuscript of this
book without the generous institutional support of the two universities. We owe
special thanks to our colleagues and graduate students at the Department of
Demography of the University of Tehran and the Australian Demographic and
Social Research Institute at the Australian National University for their support
over the years.
This book is based on the findings of three Wellcome Trust (WT) funded
projects which have been implemented since 1998. The first one was a 2 year
Postdoctoral Fellowship to the first author during 1998–2000. In this project, fertil-
ity trends and patterns in Iran during 1972 and 1996 were analyzed. Several ques-
tions arose from this study which led to two further WT funded projects awarded
to McDonald and Abbasi-Shavazi. The Iran Fertility Transition Survey (IFTS) was
conducted in four provinces of Gilan, West Azarbaijan, Sistan and Baluchistan, and
Yazd during 2002–2004. This was followed by another project entitled the Iran
Low Fertility Survey (ILFS) which was conducted in the provinces of Yazd, Gilan,
Isfahan and the city of Tehran during 2004–2007. We would like to acknowledge
the generous support of the Welcome Trust that enabled us to successfully imple-
ment the three projects.
W e owe many thanks to those who made contributions to the implementation of
the IFTS and ILFS surveys. We appreciate the support of Dr Bahram Delavar, the
former Director General of the Family Health and Population Department and his
colleagues who made the completion of the projects possible. We are also indebted
to the Iran Ministry of Health and Medical Education for providing a scholarship
vii
viii Acknowledgements
to Dr Meimanat Hosseini-Chavoshi, the third author, to complete her Ph.D. in
Demography at the ANU. Through this collaboration, Dr Hosseini made a substantial
and valuable contribution in the implementation, data collection and analysis of
these two projects. Her Ph.D. thesis was based on the findings of these two surveys
and three chapters of this book are drawn from her work. We would like to thank
the Medical Sciences Universities of Yazd, Rasht, Zahedan, Isfahan, Tehran, Iran,
Shahid Beheshti, and Oroumiyeh for their support and involvement in the accom-
plishment of our two surveys. Our appreciations go to our provincial coordinators,
Dr/s Mohammad Abbasi, Foroozandeh Kalantari, Siamak Aghlmand, Ghadirollah
Najafizadeh, Soosan Mahmoudi, Sheerin Nasirzad, Shahla Ghanbari and Pejman
Aghdak, and also to our interviewers and supervisors whose efforts were valuable
in data collection for these projects. The Statistical Center of Iran (SCI) also
provided the necessary data from the 1986, 1996, and 2006 censuses. Assistance
from Ali Reza Zahedian, Taha Nourollahi, and Neamat Mirfallah Nassiri from the
SCI are gratefully acknowledged.
We are also indebted to many colleagues for their valuables comments and ques-
tions throughout our projects. The list is long but we would like to name Terence
H. Hull, Gigi Santow, Ann Evans, Mohammad Mirzaie, Diana Glazebrook, John C.
Caldwell, Arland Thornton, John Casterline, Amir Houshang Mehryar, Zhongwei
Zhao, Chris Wilson, Geoffrey McNicoll, Albert Hermalin and the late Ronald
Freedman. Gavin Jones and S. Philip Morgan have not only provided useful com-
ments on our earlier papers and research findings, but also thoroughly reviewed the
manuscript of this book and provided valuable suggestions for the final version of
the book. Several papers have been published based on our surveys as ANU
Demography Working Papers, journal articles, book chapters and conference pre-
sentations. Several workshops also were held in Tehran to disseminate the results
of our surveys. We have benefitted from valuable comments received from partici-
pants and anonymous reviewers for each of these publications and presentations.
Many people provided administrative and institutional support for the implemen-
tation of the projects and dissemination of the findings of our surveys of whom we
would like to acknowledge the support from Taghi Azadarmaki, Hossein
Mahmoudian, Gholamreza Jamshidiha, and Mohammad Abdelahad. Assistance and
support from Evelien Bakker and Bernadette Deelen at Springer are greatly appreci-
ated. Their patience and support contributed greatly to the quality of the book as with
the extension of their deadline we were able to add more chapters and new findings
into the book. Finally, we would like to appreciate our families for their continuing
support over the last several years enabling us to complete this book.
Contents
1 The Fall in Iranian Fertility: Theoretical Considerations ..................... 1
Before and After the Islamic Revolution .................................................... 1
The Watershed in 1986 ............................................................................... 4
Acceptance of the Reality of Fertility Decline ........................................... 4
Theoretical Considerations ......................................................................... 5
Demographic Transition Theory: Modernisation, Industrialisation,
Urbanisation ................................................................................................ 5
Improvements in Child Survival ............................................................. 6
Demand Theory .......................................................................................... 6
Economic Expectations and Economic Realities .................................... 7
Status Enhancement ................................................................................ 8
Culture, Religion and the State: the Institutional Perspective .................... 8
Gender Equity Theory ............................................................................. 9
Diffusion of New Values, Rational Thought, Westernisation, Ideation .. 10
The Tempo and Quantum of Childbearing ................................................. 11
Discussion ................................................................................................... 12
Appendix 1.1: Data Sources ....................................................................... 12
The 2000 Iran Demographic and Health Survey .................................... 13
The 2002 Iran Fertility Transition Survey .............................................. 13
The 2005 Iran Low Fertility Survey ........................................................ 13
References ................................................................................................... 14
2 The Social, Economic and Cultural Contexts of
Population Policy Changes in Iran .......................................................... 17
Introduction ................................................................................................. 17
A Brief History of Population Dynamics .................................................... 17
Socio-political Changes in Iran During the Twentieth Century .................. 20
The Pahlavi Regime ................................................................................ 20
The 1979 Islamic Revolution .................................................................. 22
The Shah’s Family Planning Program ........................................................ 23
Suspension of the Family Planning Program .............................................. 24
The Emergence of Post-revolutionary Antinatalist Policy .......................... 25
The Impacts of the Post-revolutionary Family Planning Program .............. 28
ix
x Contents
The Context of the Family Planning Program ............................................ 29
Expansion of the Health Network System .............................................. 29
Rural Development ................................................................................. 31
The Status of Women in Post-revolutionary Iran .................................... 35
Administrative Divisions in Iran: Provinces (Ostans)................................. 37
Conclusion and Discussion ......................................................................... 38
References ................................................................................................... 40
3 National and Provincial Level Fertility Trends
in Iran, 1972–2006 ..................................................................................... 43
Introduction ................................................................................................. 43
Data and Method ......................................................................................... 43
Fertility Levels, Trends and Age Specifi c Patterns:
A Detailed Description ............................................................................... 46
National Trends: Total Fertility Rates: 1972–2006 ................................. 47
National Trends: Age-Specifi c Fertility Rates, 1972–2006 .................... 51
Total Fertility Rates for Rural and Urban Areas, 1972–2006 ................. 54
Age Patterns of Fertility for Rural and Urban Areas .............................. 54
Provincial Fertility Trends ...................................................................... 56
Fertility Differentials by Province: Age Specifi c
Fertility Rates, 1972–2006 ...................................................................... 59
Attainment of Below-Replacement Fertility ............................................... 61
Summary of Fertility Trends ....................................................................... 61
References ................................................................................................... 62
4 Fertility Dynamics Using Parity Progression Ratios ............................. 67
Introduction ................................................................................................. 67
The Progression to First Marriage .............................................................. 67
Progression to the First Birth (from Marriage) ........................................... 68
Progression to the Second Birth .................................................................. 71
Progression to the Third Birth ..................................................................... 72
Progression to the Fourth and Higher Order Births .................................... 74
Synthetic Lifetime Parity Distributions and Average Parities .................... 76
Decomposition of Fertility .......................................................................... 78
Discussion ................................................................................................... 80
References ................................................................................................... 80
5 Effects of Marital Fertility and Nuptiality on Fertility
Transition in Iran, 1976–2006 .................................................................. 83
Introduction ................................................................................................. 83
Changes in Age at First Marriage ............................................................... 84
Decomposition of Change in the Total Fertility Rate ................................. 86
1976–1986............................................................................................... 88
1986–1996............................................................................................... 88
1996–2006 ............................................................................................... 88
Provincial Differences ............................................................................. 89