Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi has called for policies to lower birth rate in the Arab world’s most populous country.
He said the country needs 400,000 births per year, citing China’s one-child policy as an example.
The leader of the country of 105 million inhabitants which recorded nearly 2.2 million births in 2022 intervened when his minister of health and population, Khaled Abdel Ghaffar, told a conference that “having children is a matter of complete freedom”.
Sisi said “I don’t agree with your idea that having children is total freedom. Give freedom to people who may not fully understand the magnitude of this challenge? said Sisi, a military man who became president in 2014 after ousting Islamist leader Mohamed Morsi.
The president affirmed that in the end “it is the entire society and the State of Egypt that are going to pay the price.”
“This freedom must be organized so that there is no catastrophe,” Sisi stated, at a time when The country is going through the worst economic crisis in its history.
“The Chinese made this decision in 1968,” and in 2015, Beijing officially abandoned this one-child policy. “They succeeded in population control.”
For decades, China has maintained the title of having the world’s largest population, which may be due to policies implemented since 1949 with the establishment of the People’s Republic by Mao Zedong, who urged his people to have more babies in order to “strengthen the homeland.”
However, the country’s excessive demographic growth and the famine unleashed by the country’s communist system, known as “The Great Leap Forward,” which killed more than 30 million people from malnutrition, prompted the country’s leaders to employ other measures to prevent the birth rate from rising.
Sisi, a former army general who rose to the presidency in 2014 after deposing elected president Mohamed Morsi, is expected to run for a third term at elections in early 2024.
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