Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan asks country to ‘reject’ birth control so the 80million population can continue to grow
Former leader of AK Party puts onus on women to ensure muslims 'have more children' during a speech in Instanbul
TURKISH president Recep Tayyip Erdogan has called on Muslims to “reject” contraception and “have more children”.
In a speech broadcast live on TV, he said “no Muslim family” should consider birth control or family planning.
“We will multiply our descendants,” Erdogan said, who became president in August 2014 after serving as prime minister for 12 years.
“They talk about population planning, birth control. No Muslim family can have such an approach,” added Erdogan during his speech in Istanbul.
The former leader of the AK Party, which has its roots in Islamism with many of its supporters conservative Muslims, placed the responsibility on women to not use contraceptives in order to ensure the continued growth of Turkey’s population.
"As God and as the great prophet said, we will go this way. And in this respect the first duty belongs to mothers,” he said.
The Platform to Stop Violence Against Women, which campaigns to stop the killings of hundreds of woman every year, condemned Erdogan's comments as violating the rights of women.
"You (Erdogan) cannot usurp our right to contraception, nor our other rights with your declarations that come out of the Middle Ages," the group said in a statement on Twitter.
Erdogan has previously spoken out against contraception, describing it as “treason” threatening the nation’s bloodline.
He has also urged women to have at least three children, and has said women cannot be treated as equal to men because it goes against “the laws of nature”.
On International Women’s Day, Erdogan said he believes that “a woman is above all else a mother,” stressing that women cannot be freed “by destroying the notion of family”.
And he has famously urged mothers to have four children, saying: "one (child) means loneliness, two means rivalry, three means balance and four means abundance."
The Turkish Statistical Institute states that the country’s fertility rate was 2.14 children per woman in 2015, which is half the rate in 1980.
But despite this decline, Turkey’s fertility rate is one of the highest in Europe with no signs of it waning as its 80million population continues to grow.
Turkey has a “substantial” need for quality family planning, according to the United Nations Population Fund, as one fifth of married women use abortion as a way of controlling their fertility.