Family-Planning Drive In Tunisia Reversed

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31235, 6 December 1966, Page 16

Family-Planning Drive In Tunisia Reversed

(N .Z.P.A.-Reuter) TUNIS. Tunisia has suddenly reversed the programme to control its population explosion—and is now encouraging bachelors to marry and childless couples to have children.

President Habib Bourguiba has even scolded some of his high officials for being confirmed bachelors. The new policy to encourage an increase in population comes after reports that the birth control campaign has been too effective. In a recent television address, President Bourguiba said: “If the birth rate is reduced any further, our country will risk being gradually emptied of its population.”

The 63-year-old President, twice-married and with only one child—now the Foreign Minister, Mr Habib Bourguiba, jun.—sharply attacked “those hardened celibates and all those couples hostile to procreation who are failing in their duty to the nation.” Tunisia was one of the first countries in North Africa to launch a major birth control campaign. President Bourguiba himself said earlier this year that the population increase must be slowed down if Tunisia was to develop and progress with its limited natural resources. U.N. Help Official statistics at that time showed that half of Tunisia’s population of 4.6 million was under 20 years of

age, and one woman in three between the ages of 20 and 40 became pregnant every year. Almost every doctor in the country took part in the campaign to control the birth rate. United Nations and American family planning experts helped with advice and money. Its aim was to reduce the birth rate from 46 per 1000, which would have doubled Tunisia’s population in 25 years, to 30 per 1000 by 1969. Then came a big shock in May, when the first census in 10 years was taken. President Bourguiba described the figures as “stupefying.”

He disclosed in his television speech that the population increase was, as he said, “far less serious than we had believed . . . and my ideas have been modified.” The increase was, in fact, shown to be only 2.2 to 2.3 per cent.

Then came a sharp attack on what he called “those hardened celibates and childless couples who are failing in their duty to the nation.” Many bachelors, he said, prefer an “easy life and adventure” to the responsibility of marriage. “Any young man aged over 25 should consider getting married in order to contribute to the renewal of the nation,” he added.

President Bourguiba said that the ideal Tunisian family should have at least four children. Producing children, he added, is now a social and national duty. Married couples must respect this obligation, regardless of their personal wishes. United Nations experts, the President said, should realise that the situation in Tunisia is very different from that in India, Pakistan, Indonesia and China, where populations arc increasing rapidly. He suggested that those people who were unable to have children could adopt some. As part of a new programme, a centre to treat sterile men and women has recently been opened in Tunis. But a law passed last year still makes abortion legal for any woman with more than five children—and she does not even have to have her husband’s prior consent if the operation, carried out free of charge in a hospital, is performed in the first three months of pregnancy.