IRAN: Homeless pregnant women forced to sell unborn babies at $585 out of poverty

NCRI – Some pregnant women living rough on the streets of Tehran are forced to sell their unborn babies in advance out of sheer poverty and destitution, an official of the mullahs’ regime in Iran has acknowledged.

Poverty among homeless people in 13 neighborhoods of District 12 of the Iranian capital has reached unbearable levels, university professor Dr. Chit Chian, who is a member of the 30-member Society Workgroup of the Tehran Municipality, said.

“Unfortunately in these neighborhoods we have witnessed the sale of children,” he said, adding that he had spent several nights among the homeless people in the capital to get a true picture.

“The situation is so critical that babies are being bought in advance while in their mother’s womb for the going rate of 1.75 million Tomans ($585),” Dr. Chit Chian added.

The shocking admission was made at the latest monthly session of the Society Workgroup of the Tehran municipality.

His remarks were published by the state-run Mehr news agency on Saturday. Other state-run dailies also published his account.

Ms. Farideh Karimi, a member of the Paris-based National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) and a human rights activist, on Tuesday said the suffering of the Iranian people had nothing to do with international sanctions on the regime and everything to do with the regime’s policies.

“It’s wrong to see this as just another unfortunate news story. Iran holds one tenth of the world’s proven oil reserves and has the second largest global natural gas reserves. It’s also wrong to think that this disturbing news is related to international sanctions,” Ms. Karimi said.

“As economists have reported, from 2005 to 2008, Iran’s oil export revenue amounted to $244 billion, equalling the 13 preceding years from 1992 to 2004. That’s close to $500 billion in just 17 years. This windfall could have brought about an exceptional set of circumstances for Iran; if the money was spent properly today we would not be witnessing such harrowing examples. Unfortunately however, aside from the money pocketed by the mullahs and their Revolutionary Guards, the vast proportion of Iran’s revenue has been spent on export of terrorism and fundamentalism to the region and on the regime’s nuclear weapons projects,” she said.

“Even if international sanctions are lifted, we would not witness any improvement in the lives of ordinary Iranians. None of the money will go to the pockets of the Iranian people, just as it never went prior to the sanctions taking effect.”

Addressing the same Society Workgroup in Tehran on Saturday, Reza Mahboubi, the director of the Social Office of the regime’s Interior Ministry pointed out that throughout Iran more than 18 million people are living in shanty towns or are homeless on the streets.

“These figures are truly worrying. I can’t announce many of the figures here because there are journalists present,” he said.

Last week a senior official of the regime acknowledged that at least 20,000 homeless Iranians are living in cardboard boxes on the streets of Tehran, even as the real number of homeless people in the Iranian capital is believed to be several times the official figure.

“Ten percent of those who sleep in cardboard boxes suffer from contagious illnesses and another 10 percent are affected by aids,” the official state news agency IRNA quoted the spokesperson of the Social Services Organization of the Tehran Municipality as saying. Farzad Hoshyar Parsian added that these problems have “complicated” the situation in the Iranian capital.

One of the vice presidents in the cabinet of Hassan Rouhani said last month that women make up a third of homeless people living on the streets in Iran.

"Our research indicates that there are 15,000 people sleeping in cardboard boxes in the country, of who 5,000 are women," Shahindokht Mollavardi said.

The 20,000 figure provided by the Tehran Municipality of the number of homeless people in Tehran alone dwarfs the national figures provided by Mollavardi.

The true number of Iranians living on the streets is substantially higher than official records.

Last year, a deputy director of the Tehran municipality’s Welfare Organization announced that the average age of homeless women in Iran’s capital is 32.

The head of the Social Committee in Tehran’s city council, Fatemeh Daneshvar, said in June that the number of pregnant women and children living on the streets in the city is increasing.

Homeless women and street children live in dire conditions where they survive in abandoned buildings, containers, automobiles, parks, or even on the street itself.

Street children experience many social and psychological traumas on the streets on a daily basis.

Determining the numbers of street children in Iran is virtually impossible. In a 2005 report by the U.S. State Department, by the Iranian government’s own admission, 60,000 street children were accounted for in Iran.

Numerous child rights organizations suspect that the number is substantially higher, citing figures of 200,000 or more. Of this number, about 55 percent are the children of Afghan refugees.

The Iranian regime's supreme leader Ali Khamenei and his family have amassed a huge fortune, amounting to billions of dollars, even as the people of Iran including a majority of the working class have been living in poverty and destitution.

Much of Khamenei's personal wealth is in the hands of his sons and daughters, large amounts of which are held in banks in the United Kingdom, Syria and Venezuela. Read the full report here.