Iran has ordered a notorious paramilitary group to patrol towns and villages to crack down on abortions, as the regime worries about the country’s declining population.
The “abortion patrol”, or “Nafs”, which means “life” in Persian, was announced by Saber Jabari Faruji, a health ministry official, who warned that those involved in illegal abortions will be treated “severely”, with medical staff whose license is revoked.
The patrols will be carried out by a group of paramilitary volunteers known as the Basij militia, who are staunchly loyal to the Islamic Republic. When violent protests erupted in Iran last year over the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini in the custody of Tehran vice police, the group scaled back patrols by enforcing the country’s strict clothing rules for women in hopes of allaying widespread anger.
Renewed repression
Tehran’s regime has since moved to tighten its control, launching a new crackdown on violations of mandatory hijab rules.
Women can legally access an abortion in Iran only if the fetus has been shown to have genetic disorders or if a full-term pregnancy endangers the life of the mother or child.
Some 10,000 legal abortions were performed last year, according to official figures, but with Iran’s population rapidly falling, it was the clandestine clinics terminating potentially healthy babies that alarmed Tehran.
Iran’s parliament last year approved a law banning public health departments from offering family planning services, including contraceptives, vasectomies and tubectomies, as well as free contraceptives, except when pregnancy would threaten health a woman’s. Going even further, last month President Ebrahim Raisi ordered government clinics to ban access to abortion pills, making even legal access more difficult.
Afsaneh, a social science professor in Tehran, who asked not to have his full name revealed, said the government was targeting abortions and family planning to reverse population decline.
“Access to safe abortion is essential,” she said. “Until a couple, especially the mother, is fully capable of caring for and raising the child, they cannot be responsible and committed parents. A woman who does not want to give birth may resort to dangerous means to obtain an abortion and this risks her life.
Those who can afford it go abroad to terminate unwanted pregnancies – many in Turkey, which is still accessible by road.
Options close quickly
But the options open to the less wealthy are rapidly closing.
Without access to birth control, illegal clinics have been a last resort for women who cannot afford to be caught pregnant or who are unable to raise a child.
Single women in Iran face brutal whippings, social ostracism and fines if they become pregnant out of wedlock. Now, however, the new Abortion Patrols will be watching, intent on shutting down this last resort.
Maryam, whose name has been changed to protect her identity, was 30 when she had a clandestine abortion in Tehran.
Pregnant and unmarried, she risked a fine and lashes for committing the “sin” of sex outside of marriage.
“I didn’t want children and I couldn’t tell anyone and no doctor wanted to help me,” she said. The doctors only granted permission from the Islamic court which would certainly not sanction his procedure.
Maryam was living with her boyfriend with fake documents showing them married. Like other young women in Iran, she usually had stocks of morning-after pills on the black market, but they were not always available.
When she became pregnant, she found an underground clinic through friends, run by a doctor who also worked in private hospitals.
“Dirty everywhere”
The clinic, she said, “looked like a butcher’s shop…it was dirty everywhere”.
The experiment cost him a month’s rent and it also cost him his health. Maryam said she bled for four months and ended up with a prolapsed uterus and breast and uterine cancer after complications.
“I will never forget the fear and the pain of that day. We were like the victims of an experiment in a room. After doing the work on the patient on the bed in front of me, without any cleaning, the doctor came to me with the same gloves,” she said.
Khourosh Ziabari, an Iranian journalist currently living in exile, said that despite government financial incentives for couples with more than one child, the population of 85 million, a third of whom live below the poverty line, is struggling to survive and remains unconvinced by the procreative propaganda of the regime.
“Iran’s culture war on abortion and reproductive rights is not a local phenomenon,” he said, “but in the context of Iran, [it] falls under the rubric of broader government policies aimed at restricting women’s choices and enforcing patriarchal norms.
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