Source: Aljazeera<\/p>\n
A pair of proposed laws in Iran would restrict women\u2019s reproductive choices, according to human rights advocates, who raised alarm over legislation that they say would reduce women to “baby-making machines.”<\/p>\n
Amnesty International, in a\u00a0report<\/a>\u00a0published Wednesday, denounced a proposal that would ban voluntary sterilizations, restrict abortions and block access to information on contraception.<\/p>\n A second bill would encourage early marriage and make divorce more difficult. It would also make it legal for employers to discriminate against female job candidates, particularly if they are single and have no children, according to the report. Clerics would be enlisted to endorse an \u201cIslamic-Iranian lifestyle\u201d rooted in \u201ctraditional\u201d family values that view childrearing as women\u2019s primary purpose, it added.<\/p>\n The draft bills come after decades of decline in the country\u2019s birthrate \u2014 from 7 births per woman in 1980, at the beginning of the Iran-Iraq War, to 1.85 in 2014,\u00a0according to the United Nations<\/a>. A population\u2019s replacement fertility rate is about 2.3 births per woman.<\/p>\n The government has been seeking to reverse this downward birth trend since 2012, when Iran\u2019s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei called for the country to double its population of 78 million within 50 years. In May 2014, he issued a decree urging more births to “strengthen national identity” and counter “undesirable aspects of Western lifestyles.”<\/p>\n<\/div>\n The U.N. hailed the decline in birthrate as one of most successful family planning campaigns in history. Women\u2019s literacy programs and university courses on contraception played central roles in giving women control over their reproductive decisions and lowering the birthrate, according to a\u00a0report<\/a>\u00a0by the agency’s population division.<\/p>\n Now the new bills are putting women’s reproductive choices in danger, according to Amnesty.<\/p>\n