Pakistan Has Blamed Religion for Its Population Crisis. The Data Point Somewhere More Uncomfortable

 

A Facebook Post and a Familiar Explanation

A Facebook post stopped me this week because I had heard its argument many times before. The writer recalled a conversation with Maulana Abdul Majeed Nadeem about population growth, breastfeeding, birth spacing and the successful experience of Bangladesh. Then came the sentence that caught my attention: Pakistan cannot solve its population problem without the consent of the ulema.

I read it again. Something bothered me. Sitting in Karachi, where a few kilometres can separate a university-educated professional family from a settlement struggling with basic health services, I wondered why I should treat the religious scholar as the decisive actor in both households.

Pakistan certainly has religious resistance to contraception in some communities. I do not deny it. But I think Pakistan has found the ulema a convenient explanation for a failure that belongs much closer to the state, and the numbers make that argument increasingly difficult to avoid.

Pakistan's 2023 census counted 241.49 million people. The Pakistan Bureau of Statistics put intercensal population growth at 2.55 percent a year. More recent household data give Pakistan a total fertility rate of 3.6 children per woman in 2024–25.

Those numbers are serious.

The more revealing numbers sit underneath them.

The Same Religion, Very Different Families

The Pakistan Demographic and Health Survey of 2017–18 recorded a fertility rate of 3.9 children per woman in rural Pakistan and 2.9 in urban Pakistan. Women with no education averaged 4.2 children. Women with higher education averaged only 2.6.

Wealth produced an equally uncomfortable divide. Women in the poorest households averaged 4.9 children, compared with 2.8 among women in the wealthiest households. UNFPA's 2025 population report reaches the same broad conclusion from the evidence: education and wealth remain closely associated with fertility, while place of residence produces substantial differences in reproductive outcomes.

I keep returning to one question.

What happened to religion between those households?

The woman with higher education and the woman without schooling may both be Muslim. The rich household and the poor household may hear the same Friday sermon. Yet their fertility behaviour differs dramatically.

Religion did not change. Circumstances did.

A cautious commentator may hesitate to put it this plainly, but I will: Pakistan has spent too much time discussing the fertility of poor people as a problem of belief when the data increasingly describe a problem of power, access and opportunity.

The difference matters.

Pakistan Has Been Running Family Planning Since the 1960s

Family planning did not suddenly arrive in Pakistan with a foreign-funded NGO or a television advertisement. Pakistan launched a national family-planning programme in the 1960s. More than six decades later, UNFPA's 2024 political-economy analysis describes the results as unsatisfactory.

That history should make policymakers uncomfortable. Governments changed. Generals came and went, democratic administrations returned, ministries acquired new names, donor programmes arrived with glossy reports, yet the basic delivery problem survived them all.

The 2017–18 PDHS found that only 34 percent of married women used any family-planning method. More important, 17 percent had an unmet need for family planning, meaning they wanted to delay or stop childbearing but were not using contraception.

I find the second figure more revealing than the first.

A woman who wants another child is making one kind of reproductive decision. A woman who does not want a pregnancy, or wants to postpone it, but cannot translate that preference into contraception presents a completely different public-policy problem.

Pakistan keeps mixing the two.

The PDHS found total demand for family planning among married women at 52 percent. Half of that demand was being satisfied through modern methods. Unmet need also followed the familiar class gradient: it stood at 23 percent among women in the poorest households and fell to 14 percent among the wealthiest.

Again, I ask the awkward question.

Did the rich receive a different fatwa?

A Contraceptive Can Be Known Yet Still Be Out of Reach

Knowledge alone does not put contraceptives into a woman's hand. It does not place a trained health worker in her village, and it certainly does not give her the authority to tell her husband that she wants to wait before another pregnancy.

UNFPA's 2025 report identifies some very ordinary barriers. Distance from health facilities matters. Financial constraints matter too. In some households, women require male approval before using contraception, while weak health infrastructure makes access especially difficult in poorer and rural areas.

None of this fits neatly on a television slogan.

I can picture the difference from Karachi. A middle-class woman can sit in an air-conditioned clinic, discuss side effects with a gynaecologist and switch methods if the first contraceptive does not suit her. Somewhere far from that clinic, another woman may know perfectly well that she wants no pregnancy this year and still lack the money, transport or household authority required to act on that decision.

Calling both situations "awareness" hides almost everything important.

Even the quality of counselling raises questions. Among users of modern contraception surveyed in the 2017–18 PDHS, only 35 percent said they had been informed about possible side effects or problems. Just 24 percent had been told what to do if those effects occurred.

Imagine what happens next.

A woman starts a method. She experiences bleeding, headaches or another troubling effect. Nobody has properly explained what is normal, what requires medical attention, or whether she can change methods.

She stops.

The failure may later appear in a national table as low contraceptive prevalence. From Islamabad, somebody may call it culture.

The Ulema Question Is Too Convenient

I am not arguing for excluding religious scholars. In a community where a maulana commands trust, public-health officials would be foolish to treat him as irrelevant. A respected imam who explains that birth spacing does not equal hostility to children can remove genuine fear.

But I refuse to make him the gatekeeper of Pakistan's demographic transition.

The claim that Pakistan cannot control population growth without the approval of the ulema requires evidence. Fertility varies too sharply across education, wealth and residence for religion alone to carry that explanatory burden. UNFPA's latest analysis also links greater female decision-making autonomy with higher use of modern contraception and lower unmet need.

A different picture starts to emerge.

The poorest Pakistani woman does not merely have more children. She also faces greater unmet need for contraception. Her richer counterpart has fewer children and a better chance of turning reproductive preference into reproductive behaviour.

I find that distinction politically explosive.

Pakistan's population debate often places responsibility at the bottom. Poor families have too many children. Villagers need awareness. Religious attitudes block family planning.

Then the state quietly disappears from the sentence.

Bangladesh Makes the Pakistani Excuse Harder to Defend

Bangladesh often enters this discussion as proof that religious scholars must first approve family planning. The comparison deserves more respect than such a simple story gives it.

Bangladesh is a Muslim-majority South Asian country. Its fertility decline became one of the region's most important demographic changes. Religious engagement formed part of the process, but Bangladesh also expanded family-planning delivery and pushed services closer to women.

Pakistan knew about family planning just as early.

Its national programme dates to the 1960s. Yet UNFPA still describes high unmet need and weak contraceptive uptake decades later.

The contrast should embarrass the Pakistani state more than the Pakistani mosque.

A policy does not exist because Islamabad announces it. It exists when a woman in rural Sindh can obtain a suitable contraceptive without making an exhausting journey, when she receives competent advice about side effects, and when a health facility still has the method available when she returns.

Paper programmes do not prevent pregnancies.

Delivery does.

Pakistan's Population Problem Has Already Acquired Momentum

Even a rapid fertility decline would not make Pakistan's population stop growing immediately. A large young population creates demographic momentum because huge numbers of people move into reproductive age at the same time.

I sometimes think this part of the debate receives too little attention because it lacks an obvious villain. A cleric can be blamed. A government can announce a campaign. Population momentum just sits quietly inside the age structure, carrying yesterday's high fertility into tomorrow's maternity wards and classrooms.

Pakistan now has 241.49 million people according to the 2023 census.

Think about the physical meaning of that number.

More children require classrooms. More births place pressure on maternity services. Millions of young adults will eventually seek jobs, housing and transport in cities already struggling to supply them.

I see one version of the pressure in Karachi whenever I move through its expanding edges. Concrete keeps moving outward, buses fill, apartment blocks rise where open ground existed within living memory, and another generation enters a city whose infrastructure often seems to be running behind it.

Population policy cannot recover yesterday.

The Question Pakistan Keeps Avoiding

I would still invite an imam into a village birth-spacing programme if villagers trusted him. I would listen carefully to religious objections because programmes fail when they insult the people they intend to serve.

But I would stop pretending that the imam holds the master key.

The numbers point elsewhere. Poor women have higher unmet need than rich women. Education accompanies sharply lower fertility, while women's decision-making power correlates with greater modern contraceptive use.

Pakistan's latest official household data still put fertility at 3.6 children per woman.

After more than sixty years of organised family planning, that figure should force a different conversation.

I started with a Facebook post asking how Pakistan could bring the ulema into population control. By the time I finished reading the data, I had turned the question around.

Why does an educated Pakistani woman have far fewer children than a woman without education? Why does unmet need fall as household wealth rises?

The mosque has not moved between those households.

Something else has.