TEHRAN: A law aimed at boosting Iran’s population came into force on Tuesday after concerns were raised that it would limit women’s access to reproductive health care.
The “Youthful Population and Protection of the Family” legislation was approved by parliament in October and entered into effect by notification from President Ebrahim Raisi.
The law renders reproductive screening optional, imposes restrictions on abortion and limits access to contraception, while providing added benefits to families with more children.
It also tasks public broadcasters with producing content that encourages women to have more children and denounces celibacy or abortion.
About 46.6 percent of Iran’s population of 83 million is under 30 years old, according to the latest data published in 2019 by the national statistics office.
The population under 30 has dropped since 2010 however at a negative rate of 3.24 percent.
According to the World Bank, Iran’s population growth rate has sharply declined from over four percent in the early 1980s to 1.29 percent in 2020.
The law has been criticized by United Nations experts, as well as by women’s rights activists and other rights groups.
“The consequences of this law will be crippling for women and girls’ right to health,” the UN experts said in a statement on Tuesday.
They added that it “represents an alarming and regressive U-turn by a government that had been praised for progress on the right to health.”
On Wednesday, Human Rights Watch said the law “further violates women’s rights to sexual and reproductive health and puts women’s health and lives at risk.”
It called on Iran to “immediately repeal the provisions that restrict human rights.”
In an interview with ISNA news agency, Afrouz Safarifard, an official in Iran’s social security organization, warned the new measures could lead to more children being born with congenital defects.
Masoud Mardani, a member of Iran’s national AIDS committee, cautioned on November 9 that the law would contribute to an increase in HIV infections and other sexually transmitted diseases.
Reform activist Azar Mansouri was also cited in domestic media as warning that the bill would lead to increased illegal abortions, saying these would harm women above all.
Following the 1988 Iran-Iraq war, the authorities in Tehran considered various birth control policies and in 1993 encouraged couples to have only two children, a move that quickly yielded results.
Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei subsequently declared the adoption of child control policies an “error,” describing population growth as an indicator of “national strength.”
“If God wills it, the population of the country will reach 150 million,” he said in 2018.
Early this month, Iran’s parliamentary speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf defended the law, saying it would support “young couples and mothers.”
Iran enacts population law seen to limit women’s health care
https://arab.news/6hqz2
Iran enacts population law seen to limit women’s health care
- The law renders reproductive screening optional, imposes restrictions on abortion and limits access to contraception, while providing added benefits to families with more children
- The law has been criticised by United Nations experts, as well as by women's rights activists and other rights groups
Women main victims of Sudan conflict abuses: minister to AFP
- Khalifa said sexual violence has been reported on both sides, but she insisted it is “systematic” among the RSF
- Her ministry has documented more than 1,800 rapes between April 2023 and October 2025
PORT SUDAN: Women are the main victims of abuse in Sudan’s war, facing “the world’s worst” sexual violence and other crimes committed with impunity, a rights activist turned social affairs minister for the army-backed government told AFP.
The Sudanese army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) have been locked in a brutal conflict since April 2023 that has killed tens of thousands of people, displaced around 11 million and been marked by widespread sexual violence.
Sulaima Ishaq Al-Khalifa said abuses against women routinely accompanied looting and attacks, with reports of rape often perpetrated as “the family witnessed” the crime.
“There is no age limit. A woman of 85 could be raped, a child of one year could be raped,” the trained psychologist told AFP at her home in Port Sudan.
The longtime women’s rights activist, recently appointed to the government, said that women were also being subjected to sexual slavery and trafficked to neighboring countries, alongside forced marriages arranged to avoid shame.
Khalifa said sexual violence has been reported on both sides, but she insisted it is “systematic” among the RSF, who she says use it “as a weapon of war” and for the purposes of “ethnic cleansing.”
Her ministry has documented more than 1,800 rapes between April 2023 and October 2025 — a figure that does not include atrocities documented in western Darfur and the neighboring Kordofan region from late October onwards.
“It’s about... humiliating people, forcing them to leave their houses and places and cities. And also breaking... the social fabrics,” Khalifa said.
“When you are using sexual violence as a weapon of war, that means you want to extend... the war forever,” because it feeds a “sense of revenge,” she added.
- ‘War crimes’ -
A report by the SIHA Network, an activist group that documents abuses against women in the Horn of Africa, found that more than three-quarters of recorded cases involved rape, with 87 percent attributed to the RSF.
The United Nations has repeatedly raised alarm over what it describes as targeted attacks on non?Arab communities in Darfur, while the International Criminal Court (ICC) has opened a formal investigation into “war crimes” by both sides.
Briefing the UN Security Council in mid-January, ICC deputy prosecutor Nazhat Shameem Khan said investigators had uncovered evidence of an “organized, calculated campaign” in El-Fasher — the army’s last stronghold in Darfur captured by the RSF in late October.
The campaign, Khan added, involved mass rapes and executions “on a massive scale,” sometimes “filmed and celebrated” by the perpetrators and “fueled by a sense of complete impunity.”
Darfur endured a brutal wave of atrocities in the early 2000s, and a former Janjaweed commander — from the militia structure that later evolved into the RSF — was recently found guilty by the International Criminal Court of multiple war crimes, including rape.
“What’s happening now is much more ugly. Because the mass rape thing is happening and documented,” said Khalifa.
RSF fighters carrying out the assaults “have been very proud about doing this and they don’t see it as a crime,” she added.
“You feel that they have a green light to do whatever they want.”
In Darfur, several survivors said RSF fighters “have been accusing them of being lesser people, like calling them ‘slaves’, and saying that when I’m attacking you, assaulting you sexually, I’m actually ‘honoring’ you, because I am more educated than you, or (of) more pure blood than you.”
- ‘Torture operation’ -
Women in Khartoum and Darfur, including El-Fasher, have described rapes carried out by a range of foreign nationals.
These were “mercenaries from West Africa, speaking French, including from Mali, Burkina Faso, Nigeria, Chad, as well as Colombia and Libya” — allegedly fighting alongside the RSF, Khalifa added.
Some victims were abducted and held as sexual slaves, while others were sold through trafficking networks operating across Sudan’s porous borders, said Khalifa.
Many of these cases remain difficult to document because of the collapse of state institutions.
In conservative communities, social stigma also remains a major obstacle to documenting the scale of the abuse.
Families often force victims into marriage to “cover up what happened,” particularly when pregnancies result from rape, according to the minister.
“We call it a torture operation,” she said, describing “frightening” cases in which children and adolescent girls under 18 are forced into marriage.
