Reducing Women to 'Childbearing Machines' with New Law

The year 1393 is coming to an end, and the Comprehensive Population and Family Excellence Plan, which was proposed in Khordad 1392, has yet to be approved, although the Iranian Parliament is set to vote on it soon. This plan has sparked significant reactions in Iran and has also caught the attention of Amnesty International, which released a 45-page report stating that the approval of this plan would set back the rights of Iranian women by decades and reduce women to childbearing machines. Raha Bahreini, an expert on Iran at Amnesty International, explains that these plans specifically threaten women's rights to sexual and reproductive health. The first plan, aimed at increasing fertility rates and preventing population decline, proposes to make the permanent sterilization of women illegal and prohibits the provision of information on contraceptive methods. This plan could have very concerning consequences, especially considering the complete cut in funding for family planning programs in Iran since 2012, meaning millions of women and girls will no longer have access to contraceptives or sterilization procedures. This places millions of women in Iran in an inhumane situation where they must choose between repeated and exhausting unwanted pregnancies or resorting to illegal and dangerous abortions, both of which severely impact their mental and physical health. The report also addresses the issue of women's employment in government organizations, stating that hiring women is not a priority for Iranian state organizations. Bahreini notes that Amnesty International has also protested this issue, stating that this new discrimination in employment aligns with the new population policies that aim to confine women to their homes and reinforce stereotypical gender roles, reducing women to homemakers and mothers. Iran already has one of the lowest rates of women's participation in the workforce globally. If the Comprehensive Population and Family Excellence Plan is approved in its current form, women will face even more discrimination, as Article 9 of this plan requires private and public companies to prioritize hiring men with children, followed by married men without children, and finally women with children. This regulation is a clear example of gender and marital status discrimination, contradicting all of Iran's human rights commitments. Another point considered in the Comprehensive Population and Family Excellence Plan is limiting divorce in Iran. Bahreini mentions that Article 19 of this plan bases the evaluation of judges and lawyers' performance on the number of family disputes resolved through reconciliation, which will disproportionately affect women who are already deprived of equal access to divorce in Iran. Creating financial incentives for judges to issue reconciliation rulings instead of divorce rulings contradicts the principles that require judges to make decisions impartially and without bias. This article does not consider the history of domestic violence or the accessibility or desirability of reconciliation in families where women have been subjected to violence. It is truly concerning that instead of taking effective and immediate steps to combat violence against women, legal authorities are considering measures that treat violence as a private family matter best resolved through counseling and mediation rather than serious intervention and punishment for perpetrators of violence against women. At the end of this 45-page report, Amnesty International has outlined specific demands from the Iranian government. Bahreini states that Amnesty International warns Iranian officials that imposing pregnancy on Iranian women deprives them of their autonomy and the right to make free decisions about the number of children and the spacing between them. Replacing women's personal decisions with the will of the state regarding such an important and private issue as health and fertility is unacceptable. In Iran, women are already told what to wear, where to go, and what universities to attend, and now officials are stepping further into women's private lives by dictating the number of children they should have. Amnesty International calls on Iranian judicial, parliamentary, and government officials to remove these plans from the agenda as soon as possible and urges President Rouhani's government to allocate the necessary budget to family planning programs to ensure that all women across Iran, regardless of their economic status, have access to sexual and reproductive health services.