Like other top-down concentrations of power that rely on unsustainable population growth to grow their base, Tehran is now moving to force women to have children.

According to the Los Angeles Times:

Now, ultraconservative lawmakers have combined with the administration of hard-line President Ebrahim Raisi, who was elected last year, to criminalize the termination of pregnancies except in cases of rape, incest and risks to the mother’s life. Many officials speak of producing offspring as a moral duty, with Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei condemning those who don’t as indulging in a decadent bourgeois affectation. . . . Some of the Youthful Population office’s inducements for childbearing have invited ridicule and criticism, such as making family expansion a factor for university professors to climb up the academic ladder.

Not only will Iran’s policies exacerbate the climate crisis by multiplying the nation’s environmental impact, but they do nothing to ensure that children will be born into conditions that ensure equal opportunities in life, or that will eventually lead to the development of democratic society Iran.

And that’s the whole point.

Iran’s move is enabled by the United Nation’s family planning model, which ignores human rights and environmental sustainability – never ensuring the conditions of democratic development required by things like the Children’s Convention – and instead permits unsustainable growth that favors concentrations of wealth and power in member states.

TAKE ACTION: Urge @Atayeshe, the head the UN’s Population Fund, to condemn the policy as the first and overriding human right, the right to an ecosocial Fair Start in life, the right that liberates people by limiting and decentralizing power and thereby building true democracy.