Iran calls for sterilization of homeless women

TEHRAN, Iran (Kurdistan24) – Homeless women, drug addicts, and sex workers should undergo sterilization, according to an Iranian official.

After the images of homeless men and women sleeping in open graves outside Tehran shocked the world, a deputy provincial governor in the Iranian capital called for sterilization.

Siavash Shahrivar, head of the Social and Cultural Affairs Department in the Tehran Governorate, said “these women spread depravity” and must be stopped.

“They reproduce like hatching machines,” Shahrivar told the ILNA news agency. “These women deal drugs, consume drugs, and are also prostitutes.”

“Over 20 percent of them have AIDS and [they] spread various diseases,” Shahrivar continued.

“There is a project, a reality, an opinion, agreed on by many NGOs and the social elite, that if a woman is sick, and is also a prostitute and has no place to stay, she should be sterilized with her own approval, and not forcefully,” he added.

Never referring to the cause of the problem, Shahrivar said these women sell their children because “they have no guardian.”

“The sterilization should be done through a project to convince homeless women to prevent social harm,” he added.

An Iranian cartoonist also suggested the women “must be” purified because they produce “weak genes.”

Bozorgmehr Hosseinpour, the cartoonist, said to “block the misery of poor humans who enter this world with many diseases, pain, and addiction” women must be prevented from giving birth.

The remarks outraged feminists who suggested “Nazi cleansing” projects were not as blunt.

“In a corrupt society like Iran…the question should be how to prevent the issue of extreme poverty and how to protect vulnerable women not to neuter them like animals,” Soma Moahabadi told Kurdistan24.

The Kurdish feminist said the society presents the homeless not as victims but as criminals, not as humans but as insects.

Editing by Karzan Sulaivany