ISTANBUL — President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey has called birth control a “betrayal” and his country’s falling birth rate a “disaster.”
For much of his 23 years as Turkey’s top politician, he has urged Turks to have more children and promoted traditional families, in which fathers provide and mothers focus on the home — with three children, if not more.
“Why not have at least four children, or five?” Erdogan said recently. More births, he said, would empower Turkey to “proceed into the future in a stronger fashion.”
His pitch is not working.
Turkey’s total fertility rate — or the average number of children a woman is expected to have — has been declining for more than a decade. It now sits significantly below the 2.1 needed to keep the population stable without migration, much less to increase it.
