How Iran’s protests are a response to the “backslide” in women’s health rights

On 16 September 2022, Mahsa Amini, a 22 year old Iranian girl, died after being arrested by the morality police for breaking the laws around “inappropriate attire”—she was wearing skinny jeans and not wearing her hijab “correctly.” It sparked one of the largest protests for women’s rights in the country’s history (still ongoing at the time of writing).This comes in the wake of a contentious law, enacted by Iran’s all male, 12 member Guardian Council in November 2021: the Youthful Population and Protection of the Family law. The law is overtly aimed at boosting the nation’s fertility rate but also severely restricts women’s access to abortion, contraception, and sterilisation, and its chilling effects are now being seen in Iran’s government run healthcare services.“The Iranian administration wants to control women’s bodies,” says Samaneh Savadi, an Iranian feminist activist and legal scholar based in the UK, of Iran’s patriarchal statecraft. “The [compulsory]…
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