Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan described efforts to promote birth control as "treason," saying contraception risked causing a whole generation to dry up, reports said Monday.
Erdogan made the comments on Sunday, addressing a bride and groom at the wedding ceremony of the son of businessman Mustafa Kefeli, who is one his close allies.
He told the newlyweds that using birth control was a betrayal of Turkey's ambition to make itself a flourishing nation with an expanding young population.
"One or two (children) is not enough. To make our nation stronger, we need a more dynamic and younger population. We need this to take Turkey above the level of modern civilizations," Erdogan said.
"In this country, they (opponents) have been engaged in the treason of birth control for years and sought to dry up our generation," Erdogan said.
Erdogan went on to praise marriage and said: "Marriage is a long journey. There are good days and bad days. Good days become more frequent as we share them and bad days finally bring happiness if we are patient."
"One (child) means loneliness, two means rivalry, three means balance and four means abundance. And God takes care of the rest," he added, in comments reported by the Dogan news agency, which also posted a video of his speech.
Erdogan previously made proposals to limit abortion rights, the morning-after pill and Caesarian sections. But this appears to be his strongest attack on the principle of birth control yet.
He repeatedly warned that Turks must have more children to prevent the rapid aging of the population.
Turkey's population has risen exponentially in the recent decades and now stands at over 76 million.
The news comes after Erdogan drew the ire of feminist groups last month for declaring in a speech that women are not equal to men.
At a summit in Istanbul on justice for women, Erdogan said that biological differences between women and men mean they cannot serve the same functions in life.
"Our religion (Islam) has defined a position for women (in society): motherhood," Erdogan told an audience of Turkish women including his own daughter, Sumeyye.
Moreover, he was bluntly hostile towards the audience at the summit saying, "some people can understand this, while others can't. You cannot explain this to feminists because they don't not accept the concept of motherhood."
He recalled: "I would kiss my mother's feet because they smelled of paradise. She would glance coyly and cry sometimes."
"Motherhood is something else," he added.
In August, he drew mass criticism regarding his attitude towards the media and women when in a television debate he said to a woman journalist that she was a "shameless woman" and told her "to know [her] place."
Erdogan publicly chastised Amberin Zaman, a respected journalist who in addition to writing for The Economist for 15 years, also writes for the Turkish daily Taraf.
"A militant in the guise of a journalist, a shameless woman... know your place!" he declared adding, "they gave you a pen and you are writing a column in a newspaper... and you insult a society that is 99 percent Muslim," drawing loud boos from the crowd.
Earlier this month, Erdogan was also widely slammed for his plans to make lessons in Ottoman Turkish mandatory in high schools, prompting one opposition politician to declare that an army could not force his daughter to learn the language.
Erdogan said that Ottoman, an old form of Turkish using a version of Arabic script replaced by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk with the Latin alphabet on foundation of the secular Republic in 1923, should be taught in schools to prevent younger generations losing touch with their cultural heritage.
"Erdogan's concern is not teaching the Ottoman language… his real aim is a settling of accounts with secularism and the Republic," Akif Hamzacebi, spokesman for the main opposition CHP in parliament.
The Islamic-rooted government of Erdogan has long been accused by critics of seeking to impose strict Islamic values on the private lives of Turks as well as limiting the civil liberties of women.
Opponents accuse Erdogan of behaving like a modern-day sultan, his Islamist ideology and intolerance of dissent taking Turkey far from Ataturk's secular ideals.
(AFP, Al-Akhbar)
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