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Abortion ‘murder’, no Muslims should engage in birth control: Turkish President

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has said that no Muslim family should adopt birth control measures, stressing that his country's population will grow.

India TV News Desk India TV News Desk Published on: May 31, 2016 8:21 IST
Recep Tayyip Erdogan
Recep Tayyip Erdogan

Ankara: Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has said that no Muslim family should adopt birth control measures, stressing that his country's population will grow.

Erdogan said it was the responsibility of mothers to ensure the continued growth of Turkey’s population, which has expanded at a rate of around 1.3% in the past few years.

"I am saying this clearly, we will increase our posterity and reproduce generations. As for population planning or birth control, no Muslim family can engage in such a mentality," Erdogan said.

Speaking to the Service for Youth and Education Foundation of Turkey, Erdogan emphasised, "We will follow the road that my God and dear Prophet (Mohammed) says."

The Turkish President also opposed abortion on several occasions, describing it as ‘murder’.

Erdogan and his wife, Emine, have two sons and two daughters. This month, the President attended the high-profile wedding of his younger daughter, Sumeyye, to Selçuk Bayraktar, a defence industrialist. His elder daughter, Esra, and her husband, Berat Albayrak, the Energy Minister, have three children.

Erdogan has often annoyed feminists and women’s activists with his comments on sex and family planning. In a speech marking International Women’s Day this year, he said he believed that ‘a woman is above all else a mother’.

In 2014, he described birth control as a ‘treason’ that risked causing a whole generation to ‘dry up’. And he once urged mothers to have four children, saying, “One means loneliness, two means rivalry, three means balance and four means abundance.”

According to the statistics office, Turkey’s population rose to 78.7 million last year. The population in 2000 was less than 68 million.

Economists say that one of the key problems for the Turkish economy is the failure to integrate women into the workforce. But the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), which Erdoğan co-founded, angrily rejects allegations of sexism and says it has done more than any other Turkish government to encourage women to work.

According to official statistics from 2015, 31.5% of women participate in the labour force in Turkey.

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