Turkish president says it is the responsibility of mothers to ensure the continued growth of country’s population

Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, has said family planning and contraception are not for Muslim families – the latest in a series of comments promoting population growth that have angered women’s activists.

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 will say it clearly … We need to increase the number of our descendants,” he said in a speech in Istanbul. “People talk about birth control, about family planning. No Muslim family can understand and accept that. As God and as the great prophet said, we will go this way. And in this respect the first duty belongs to mothers.”

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Erdoğan 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.

The campaign group Platform to Stop Violence Against Women condemned Erdoğan’s comments. “You cannot usurp our right to contraception, nor our other rights with your declarations that come out of the Middle Ages,” the group said in a statement on Twitter. “We will protect our rights.”

Erdoğan 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.”

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

The lack of women in Turkey’s new cabinet under the prime minister, Binali Yildirim, announced last week, has also annoyed activists. The only female minister is Fatma Betul Sayan Kaya in the family and social policy ministry, a post which has always gone to a woman.

According to economists, 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.

Emine Erdoğan spoke at a conference promoting women’s employment on Monday, saying “we should ensure gender equality”. She said Turkey was “not at the level we want” in terms of women working, but added that the employment rate among women was rising.

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