Politics in Brief

by PRESCA AHN

Decem­ber 2009

The Iran­ian gov­ern­ment has inten­si­fied a month-long crack­down on civil rights activists, includ­ing many promi­nent fem­i­nists. After the past spring’s remark­able elec­tion protests, in which women par­tic­i­pated in unprece­dented num­bers, Mah­moud Ahmadinejad’s admin­is­tra­tion is mak­ing an exam­ple of women’s rights lead­ers. In Novem­ber, police arrested and jailed Mehrnoosh Eter­nadi, an edu­ca­tor who holds work­shops about vio­lence against women; author­i­ties also seized her com­puter and per­sonal papers. In the same month, at least 11 fem­i­nist lead­ers were threat­ened by phone, brought to court, or for­bid­den from leav­ing the coun­try. Iran­ian state tele­vi­sion broad­cast a doc­u­men­tary attack­ing Iran­ian fem­i­nism. The hus­band of Nobel Prize win­ner Shirin Ebadi was beaten and inter­ro­gated by state police about the couple’s daugh­ters, who are study­ing in Europe. Author­i­ties also con­fis­cated Ebadi’s Nobel medal and froze her bank account. The government’s rea­son for this treat­ment was Ebadi’s alleged fail­ure to pay back taxes; it was no coin­ci­dence, how­ever, that Ebadi had recently expressed her sup­port for U.N. crit­i­cism of Iran’s human rights record. In early Decem­ber, female tele­vi­sion pre­sen­ters were for­bid­den from wear­ing makeup on their shows and over ten women were arrested at a rally of moth­ers whose chil­dren had died in protests of the spring elections.

Amid the furor over the Stupak-Pitts amend­ment in recent weeks, it was easy to miss another D.C. dis­ap­point­ment: the Senate’s fail­ure to per­ma­nently repeal the global gag rule. Since Rea­gan authored it in 1984, the global gag rule— which pro­hibits fed­er­ally funded NGOs abroad from facil­i­tat­ing or even sug­gest­ing abor­tion as a fam­ily plan­ning option— has lived and died by pres­i­den­tial whims. Clin­ton rescinded it in 1993. The sec­ond Bush brought it back in his first exec­u­tive order (on the 28th anniver­sary of Roe v. Wade). In Jan­u­ary, Obama signed another exec­u­tive order to reverse Bush’s. This cycle will con­tinue until Con­gress man­ages to pass a per­ma­nent repeal like the one that sen­a­tors removed from a recent State For­eign Oper­a­tions bill. Con­tin­u­ing fail­ure to pass such a pro­vi­sion will make no head­lines dur­ing this pres­i­dency. But it will aggra­vate the fragility of our country’s com­mit­ment to effec­tive fam­ily plan­ning among the world’s poor.