by LEILA MOURI
In a matter of one week in the U.S. and Iran, authorities have made decisions that restrain women’s right to control their bodies. On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court voted in favor of permitting family companies to deny employees insurance coverage for contraception in the name of religious freedom. Whereas, Iranian MPs ratified a bill last week which in case of becoming a law criminalizes any act that promotes or employs birth control tools and methods.
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Based on the Iranian bill, every individual who does vasectomy or tubectomy (tubal ligation) could face 2-5 years of imprisonment. A policy change from the late 1980s and 1990s, when Iranian government implemented a comprehensive national family planning project, which based on UN reports, was one of the most successful population policies.
Family planning was a rational solution to the problem of a population boom resulting from political-religious preaches by the Islamic regime in the first decade after the 1979 Revolution. It led to the reduction of Iran’s population growth rate from 3.2 in 1986 to 1.29 in 2010. It meant less pregnancy for Iranian women and thus more achievement in education; it could be a reason for Iranian women being 60 percent of college students since the 2000s.
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