Countdown: Our Last, Best Hope for a Future on Earth?

by Alan Weisman

  Even during sanctions, Tehran, like Havana, thrums with energy. But it lives on time borrowed from mountain springs recharged by rain. In 1900, they easily supported the 150,000 Tehranis. Counting the 3 million workers who commute here daily, 15 million drain that water today, a hundred-fold increase in just over a century. Khomeini’s divine mandate to build not just an army, but an Islamic generation with no memory of the Shah, spawned as breathtaking a demographic leap as the world had ever seen—which made what came next all the more astonishing.

  In 1987, Dr. Hourieh Shamshiri Milani finished her obstetrics and gynecology residency in Tehran. During the war, her specialty had become politicized, as demographics became the most potent weapon in Iran’s arsenal. With the stunning 1986 census figures, Iran’s prime minister declared their new huge population “God-sent.” But others—especially the director of Iran’s planning and budget office—were plain frightened. As the stalemated war headed to a UN-brokered ceasefire, his office calculated the numbers that their shattered economy might reasonably support. All those males born to man the Twenty Million Man Army would need jobs, and chances for providing them shrank with each new birth.

  Secret meetings commenced with the Supreme Leader to discuss the population blessing that was now a population crisis. Years later, demographer and population historian Abbasi-Shavazi would interview the 1987 planning and budget director, and learn that he had met with the president’s cabinet and explained what excessive human numbers portended for the nation’s future. To feed, educate, house, and employ everyone would far outstrip their capacity, as Iran was exhausted and nearly bankrupt. There were so many children that primary schools had to move from double to triple shifts. The planning and budget director and the minister of health presented an initiative to reverse demographic course and institute a nationwide family-planning campaign. It was approved by a single vote.

  A month after the August 1988 ceasefire finally ended the war, Iran’s religious leaders, demographers, budget experts, and health minister gathered for a summit conference on population in the eastern city of Mashhad, one of holiest cities for the world’s Shi’ite Muslims, whose name means “place of martyrdom.” The weighty symbolism was clear.

  “The report of the demographers and budget officers was given to Khomeini,” Dr. Shamshiri recalls. The economic prognosis for their overpopulated nation must have been very dire, given the Ayatollah’s contempt for economists, whom he often referred to as donkeys.

  “After he heard it, he said, ‘Do what is necessary.’ ”

  It meant convincing 50 million Iranians of the opposite of what they’d heard for the past eight years: that their patriotic duty was to be forcibly fruitful. Now, a new slogan was strung from banners, repeated on billboards, plastered on walls, broadcast on television, and preached at Friday prayers by the same mullahs who once enjoined them to produce a great Islamic generation by making more babies:

  One is good. Two is enough.

  The next year, 1989, Imam Khomeini died. The same prime minister who had hailed fertility rates approaching nine children per woman as God-sent now launched a new national family-planning program. Unlike China, the decision of how many was left to the parents. No law forbade them from having ten if they chose. But no one did. Instead, what happened next was the most stunning reversal of population growth in human history. Twelve years later, the Iranian minister of health would accept the United Nations Population Award for the most enlightened and successful approach to family planning the world had ever seen.

  If it all was voluntary, how did Iran do it?

  Nodding to the Persian music issuing from the piano, Dr. Shamshiri smiles, remembering. “We used horses. Doctors and surgeons, teams from universities, carrying our equipment on horseback to every little village.”

  The horseback brigades that Dr. Hourieh Shamshiri and her fellow OB-GYNs accompanied to the farthest reaches of the country made any kind of birth control—from condoms and pills to surgery—available to every Iranian, for free. Because Ayatollah Khomeini’s original contraception fatwa emphasized that neither mother nor child should be harmed, it was assumed to exclude both abortion and operations. But his successor, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, issued a fatwa of his own—“When wisdom dictates that you do not need more children, a vasectomy is permissible”—that was interpreted to include tubal ligations for women.

  The program’s initial goals were modest. According to Mohammad Abbasi-Shavazi, they hoped to reduce the average fertility rate of Iranian women to four children by 2011, and eventually drop the population growth rate from its astronomical levels during the war to slightly above replacement rate. But Iranian families were just as broke and fatigued as the nation, and they leaped at the chance for fewer children. Within two years, Iran’s demographers were disbelieving their own numbers.

  The horseback doctors had planned to encourage women—who were not required to seek husbands’ approval for birth control—to space pregnancies three to four years. They were to advise them to bear children only between ages eighteen and thirty-five, and to suggest stopping with three children. “But every woman who already had children wanted an operation,” says Dr. Shamshiri. “More than a hundred thousand women of that generation were sterilized. All the younger ones told me they only wanted two, one of each if they could. I’d ask them why. ‘The cost of rearing children,’ was the first thing they said. So I’d ask them to imagine that tomorrow their economic problems had been solved, how many children would they want. Again, they answered, ‘Two, because of education. We should send our daughters to university.’ ”

  They were seeing modern women on television—including herself, as she and other gynecologists were now frequently on Iranian TV programs. “Families would find my telephone number. They’d ask, ‘How did you get this degree? How can we educate our daughters like you?’ ”

  Increasingly, the answer was easy. All the accolades that Iran’s family-planning program received in forthcoming years cited one indispensable factor: female education. Not just primary and secondary, but university. In 1975, barely a third of Iranian women could read. In 2012, more than 60 percent of Iranian university students were female. The literacy rate for females twenty-six and under was 96 percent. Giving women control over their wombs and their education made it increasingly hard to deny them the workplace. By 2012, one-third of government employees in Iran were women. As Dr. Shamshiri recalls her horseback missions, two taxis arrive at the Espinas Hotel driven by female cabbies, while just beyond, women police officers cruise Keshavarz Avenue.

  At one point during the push to a Twenty Million Man Army, the marriage age for girls dropped again, to nine—the “official age of puberty.” With the family-planning program, that was repealed, and the average age of a bride soon rose to twenty-two, as women postponed marriage and childbearing until they finished school. By the 1994 World Population Conference in Cairo, the numbers from Iran were so astounding that UNFPA sent its demographers to check the figures that Abbasi-Shavazi and his colleagues were collecting—and got the same results. Dr. Hourieh Shamshiri, by then a deputy in Iran’s Ministry of Health, was a delegate, and was besieged with questions. Everyone wanted to know how such a thing could happen in a Muslim nation—and with a voluntary program, no less.

  There was no covert coercion, she’d explain. The sole requirement was that all couples attend premarital classes, held in mosques or in health centers where couples went for prenuptial blood tests. The classes taught contraception and sex education, and stressed the advantages of having fewer children to feed, clothe, and school. The only governmental disincentive was elimination of the individual subsidy for food, electricity, telephone, and appliances for any child after the first three.

  By 2000, Iran’s total fertility rate reached replacement level, 2.1 children per woman, a year faster than China’s compulsory one-child policy. In 2012, it was 1.7.

  “Iran’s family-planning program succeeded,” says Mohammad Jalal Abbasi-S
havazi, “thanks to the Islamic revolution. There was a national commitment to reduce the gaps from the Shah’s time between rich and poor, urban and rural.”

  Under the Shah, agriculture ministers rarely left Tehran. Now water, sanitation, agriculture, energy, and finance officers arrived in the remotest villages, extending technical help during planting, installing toilets, launching literacy programs. “Most important was building a health network that reached the farthest outposts of the country.”

  Every hamlet in Iran today has a “health house,” staffed by two behvarz selected by the village. Usually a man and a woman, they receive two years of training in family medicine, including prenatal and postnatal care, contraception, and immunization. For illness, there is a rural clinic for every five health houses, staffed by doctors, who also visit each health house twice a week.

  The behvarz maintain birth, death, and vaccination records for each person. In Iranian cities, teams of women volunteers go door-to-door, doing the same. With such oversight, the spread of diseases like tuberculosis was checked, and Iran’s infant mortality rate dropped to western European levels, further convincing parents to limit family size.

  It was to these health houses that Hourieh Shamshiri, her fellow OB-GYNs, and horseback mobile surgical teams would arrive. As Iran’s postwar economy improved, horses gave way to four-wheel-drive vehicles and even helicopters. Iran pioneered “no-scalpel” vasectomies, ten-minute procedures involving just a tiny puncture in the abdomen. During the early years of the revolution, contraceptives were often hard to find. Now Iran became one of the world’s biggest producers of condoms. Several months’ worth of contraceptive supplies were stockpiled to assure that shortages didn’t occur. And everything—condoms, pills, IUDs, injections, vasectomies, and tubal ligations—remained free.

  Nevertheless, demographers report, the preferred method of contraception in Iranian cities remains coitus interruptus. One reason may be that the cautionary tale in Genesis of Onan, whom God kills for disobeying his father by spilling his seed on the ground, has no equivalent in Islam: according to Hadith commentaries to the Qur’an, the Prophet Muhammad did not forbid withdrawal, known as al-azl.

  According to Dr. Shamshiri, the truth is more mundane. “It’s the usual fear of side effects, and dislike of using condoms. Which is why sterilization and vasectomies are so popular, once people have the children they desire.”

  One other country where reliance on withdrawal is similarly high is Italy, which also has low fertility rates and, coincidentally, is also home to a theocracy—albeit a theocracy reduced to 110 acres in which no females reside. Outside the Vatican walls, abortion is legal during the first trimester. In Iran, however, abortion is prohibited, despite suggestions in the Qur’an that the soul does not enter a fetus until the fourth month of pregnancy.

  “Abortion is still illegal,” says Dr. Shamshiri, now a professor at Tehran’s Shahid Beheshti University of Medical Science. “A few years ago, Parliament expanded a rule about saving a mother’s life to include therapeutic abortion. It took hard work to pass this.”

  In the halls of Parliament, religious authorities had confronted her. “Abortion is killing. Why do you write papers supporting it?” the mullahs demanded.

  “You asked today if a fetus is a person or not,” she replied. “Because, you said, if a fetus is a person, you can’t kill it.”

  They nodded.

  “It’s worth discussing. But first, I hope you agree that a woman is a person.”

  On religious grounds, it is difficult for her. “As a matter of women’s rights, I support abortion. But personally, I don’t agree. I won’t do abortions myself. If I have a patient with breast cancer who needs a therapeutic abortion, I refer her. But women should use family planning if they don’t want pregnancy. If they do, the need for abortion becomes very rare.”

  Rare, but never zero. Condoms can break. Antibiotics can lower the effectiveness of pills. And al-azl has a notable failure rate. In Iran, as everywhere, women find ways to have an abortion. In wealthy North Tehran, where women see private doctors, it is not hard to find physicians to perform safe abortions. Dr. Shamshiri’s concern is for poor women whose contraceptives fail. “We have a street in Tehran where illegal drugs are sold, including abortive drugs. People go there and buy suppositories. That is not safe. That’s why it is important to provide women this service.”

  In 2005, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a conservative ex-mayor of Tehran popular among the working class, was elected president of Iran. In 2006, he proclaimed that Iran’s family-planning program was un-Islamic. He called for women sixteen or older to leave the universities, get married, and get pregnant. Iran’s 70 million population, he said, needed to add 50 million more. His pronouncement helped spur Iranian women to collect a million signatures demanding repeal of all laws that denied them equality, a campaign that won many international women’s rights awards.

  In June 2009, in what was overwhelmingly believed a rigged result, Ahmadinejad was reelected over a moderate reform candidate. The streets of Iranian cities filled with hundreds of thousands protesters, the majority female. When a philosophy student named Nedā Āghā-Soltān was shot by a member of the Ayatollah’s paramilitary volunteer militia, her death, captured on video, was seen by millions around the world.

  Iran’s so-called Green Revolution, named for the moderate opposition leader’s campaign color, became an inspiration for the Arab Spring uprisings. But the regime’s brutish response—at least seventy slain, and hundreds more imprisoned—sapped its energy. The massive street gatherings are gone, but as one anonymous participant says, “This revealed how corrupt the Revolution has become. The love we feel for Islam has been undermined by our contempt for the mullahs who mix mosque and state, and are destroying both in the process.”

  The newly reelected President Ahmadinejad reiterated his call to nearly double the population, which was denounced in Parliament, in the Ministry of Health, and even by some clerics. His offer of 10 million rials—about US$1,000—for every new baby backfired when the math of population increase was explained to him and he realized that his goal, 1.35 million new children per year, would cost more than a billion dollars annually. His modification—the money would be held in trust, and given to the child at age eighteen—earned even more derision, and women ignored it.

  “The preference for one or two children, or even none, is now woven into the cultural fabric of the nation,” said demographer Abbasi-Shavazi in 2011. “What will happen is what women want. And they don’t want three.”

  “I once read,” says Hourieh Shamshiri, “that you save women so that women will save the world. My Muslim religion is a pure one in which woman is as human as man, and their rights are equal. We have a sentence in the Holy Qur’an that means ‘We created you from the same soul.’ Different shapes, but the same soul.”

  ii. Carpets

  For centuries, the cultural fabric of Iran has been woven by Persian carpet makers. In Turkish rugs, each strand of yarn is knotted around two warp strands, but Persian rugs, with one weft per each warp, are twice as tight. The tightest still made today, in Iranian cities such as Esfahan, have 144 knots per square centimeter. A rug like that, of wool from the bellies of spring lambs, can take two people eight years to finish. In Tehran’s Carpet Museum hang old masterpieces created for royal families with 160 knots per centimeter, woven by girls with sharp eyes and tiny fingers. One fabulously complex floral pattern that measures 320 square feet took three people working ten hours day eighteen years to complete—the principal weaver was seventeen when she started, and thirty-five when it was finished.

  As a biology student in the 1960s, Esmail Kahrom would stare at rugs in the museum, such as one completed in 1416 that depicts the Tree of Life, a Zoroastrian symbol that predates Islam. Among its branches he recognized turkeys, bustards, vultures, mynahs, owls, doves, thrushes, hoopoes, flamingoes, swallows, quail, parrots, ostriches, and partridges. Around the trunk crawled bears, turtles, all
igators, beetles, centipedes, lions, and leopards.

  The depictions were so detailed that zoologists could determine each species. He was looking, Kahrom understood, at creatures now extinct in his land. The eyes of ancient carpet weavers are how Iranian biologists today know what once lived here.

  Esmail Kahrom was the son of an air force pilot who, like his mother, was one of twelve children. As a boy, his father would take him riding in Khosh Yelagh, a wildlife refuge whose name means good summer pasture, in the eastern Alborz Mountains watershed, just south of the Caspian Sea. The grass there grew so tall that he would lose sight of the park ranger guide and have to stand on his horse’s back to see where the stalks were moving, to know which way to go. Khosh Yelagh was then home to the largest population of cheetahs in Iran. The sight of the fleet creatures thrilled him, and he resolved to become a naturalist.