In remarks that have drawn criticism, he told MPs he wanted to scrap existing birth control policies which discouraged Iranian couples from having more than two children.
Women should work less and devote more time to their “main mission” of raising children, Mr Ahmadinejad said.
His comments amounted to an attack on official policies - sanctioned by senior Islamic clerics - aimed at limiting Iran’s population, currently around 70 million. The government supports a range of birth control measures, including female sterilisation, vasectomies and mandatory family planning classes for newly-weds. Iran also has a state-owned condom factory.
However, Mr Ahmadinejad said: “I am against saying that two children are enough. Our country has a lot of capacity. It has the capacity for many children to grow in it. It even has the capacity for 120 million people. Westerners have got problems. Because their population growth is negative, they are worried and fear that if our population increases, we will triumph over them.”
He said he wanted to bring in legislation reducing women’s working hours based on how many children they had. Women could work part-time on full-time salaries.
Critics reacted with alarm and said the president’s call was ill-judged at a time when Iran was struggling with surging inflation and rising unemployment, unofficially estimated at around 25%.
The reformist Etemad-e Melli newspaper warned that Iran could pay a high price for such “ill-considered” comments. It wrote: “He stresses the necessity of population growth and the triumph of Iran over western governments, ignoring the fact that what leads to such triumph is not population size but knowledge, technology, wealth, welfare and security.”
Mr Ahmadinejad’s call for a higher birth rate echoes a similar demand by the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini after the triumph of Iran’s Islamic revolution in 1979. The policy led to a population explosion but was later reversed because of the strain on the economy. As a result, population growth dropped from an all-time high of 3.2% in 1986 to around 1.2% today, similar to that of the United States.
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