The hypothesis of the relationship between housing types and fertility, which was originally developed and tested in Bogota, Colombia's housing study, is reexamined using Iranian data of urban married women of reproductive age. The findings of the study clearly and consistently show that women living in single-family housing units have significantly higher actual and desired fertility than women living in multi-family housing units, regardless of their major social, economic and demographic differences. Furthermore, the analysis of the relative effects of socioeconomic and demographic variables on fertility indicate that housing types have greater effects on fertility than wife and husband's level of education, when the effects of other variables are controlled. This study implies that crowding and density, which generally are the outcome of high fertility, do have feedback effects causing fertility to decline. This provides some evidence for the hypothesis of self-generating fluctuations in population growth which maintains that a large population will face stiff economic competition, lower incomes, congestion and crowding if other means of production as well as social infrastructure do not expand simultaneously. Finally, this study suggests an optimistic sign of fertility reduction in the large urban populations where the single-family housing units are being replaced by multi-family housing units mainly because of high cost of land, material, and labor, and the shortage of housing units. Most of the large cities in Iran today fit the above descriptions.

Abstract. The purpose of this paper is to examine some of the possible causal links between modernization forces and fertility patterns of the Iranian provinces during three time periods, 1966, 1976 and 1986. A modernization scale was constructed using Iranian census data. Six indicators of industrialization, urbanization and universal education were used to develop the scale. The ratio of children under 5 years per women 15 to 44 years old was used as a measure of fertility. The findings show that modernization has proceeded upward in an almost consistent pattern in all the provinces during 1966-1986. The Islamic Revolution and Iran-Iraq War not only did not disrupt the modernization trend, it seems that both events accelerated the rate of change. The modernization indicators, individually and collectively, were significantly and inversely correlated with fertility ratios. However, the fertility ratios of the provinces substantially increased in the decade of 1976 to 1986. Our thesis is that the elimination of the national family planning program which happened in the early part of the post-Islamic Revolution had significant effect on the fertility increase of the period 1976 to 1986. The current active family planning program of the Islamic Republic of Iran suggests that the fertility rate of Iran, very likely, will decline in the near future if the current modernization trend and fertility regulation policy continue.

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In a 1989 Family Planning Study in Iran, 40 percent of the married women of reproductive age reported that their last or current pregnancies were unwanted and unintended. This finding is consistent with the results obtained from a number of studies undertaken in the countries of North Africa and the Middle East. Although the phenomenon of unwanted pregnancy is a significant topic in the population studies, it has received very little attention. This paper shows the differences between two groups: group A, those married women who reported that their last or current pregnancies were wanted, and group B, those married women who reported that their last or current pregnancies were unwanted. The findings of this study clearly show significant differences between these two groups in regard to some key sociodemographic attributes: wife/husband's education, actual and desired fertility, wife's current age, past and present practice of contraceptive methods, and extent of satisfaction with family planning services are among the attributes differentiating these two groups. Our examination of these variables suggests that group B had higher parity, fertility, less desire for more children, less use of contraceptive techniques, and less satisfaction with the efficiency of the contraceptive techniques than group A. The relationship between education and wanted/unwanted pregnancies is mixed. The urban women who wanted-pregnancies and were 25 years old or older were more educated than those who did not want pregnancies. On the contrary, the rural women whose pregnancies were not wanted were more educated than those who wanted pregnancies regardless of age, parity, and locality differences. Furthermore, the urban/rural women with different levels of parities who did not want to be pregnant were more educated than the urban/rural women who wanted pregnancies. Finally, the standardized regression coefficients, obtained in logistic regression, reveal that among urban women the desire for more children and parity are the first and second most significant independent variables differentiating between group A and group B. Among rural women, living children and the desire for more children were the first and second most important variables differentiating between group A and group B.