Turkish President Erdoğan slams birth control, calls for ‘strong families’

Speaking during the wedding of a Turkish singer late on May 6, Erdoğan advised the newly-wed couple to have children.

“I always give this advice. When you have one child, it’s lonely. When it’s two, there is rivalry. When it’s three, there is balance and when it’s four, there is richness. Strong nations consist of strong families. They deceived us with birth control for years,” Erdoğan said.

Erdoğan has been a staunch supporter of having multiple children and this is not the first time that he criticized birth control and population planning.

“Whether it’s population planning or birth control, no Muslim family can be in such an understanding and the main duty falls on mothers,” Erdoğan said in the previous years, prompting major outcry from women’s rights organizations.

In 2012, meanwhile, then Prime Minister Erdoğan characterized abortion as murder.

“I’m a prime minister who is against births with C-section. I perceive abortion as murder. No one should have the right to allow this. There is no difference between killing a child in a mother’s womb and killing after birth. We must join forces against this,” he said back then.

Moreover, in 2016, Erdoğan described a woman who refuses to have a child as a “lacking, half person.”

“I can’t accept the fact that work life became the alternative of motherhood. A woman who says ‘I’m working’ and refrains from being a mother actually denies her womanhood. A woman who refuses motherhood and taking care of her house faces the danger of losing her freedom no matter how successful she is in the business world. She is lacking and a half person,” he said, adding that “refusing motherhood means giving up on the half of a human being.”

“Let me broaden this. It is giving up on humanity. That’s why I’m advising couples to have three kids,” he also said.

'Bizi yıllarca doğum kontrolüyle aldattılar'