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TEHRAN (AFP) - Iran's state hospitals are refusing to perform abortions when the unborn child has been diagnosed with thalassemia despite religious clearance to do so, press reports said Sunday. The hospitals are declining to perform the abortions, which are otherwise illegal in Iran, because they say no clear law is on the books to allow the procedure, the Kayhan International newspaper said. It cited specialists who said the refusal meant mothers were being forced to have the procedure done either in private clinics at great expense or in "unhygienic and unprofessional" circumstances. But the paper cited a religious decree or fatwa by supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei giving his approval for abortion when the presence of thalassemia, an inherited blood disorder, has been detected. "If there exists a definite diagnosis in the embryonic stage, and to deliver such a child amounts to committing a sin - which is definitely so - it is advisable to abort the fetus before it is given a soul," it quoted Khamenei's decree as saying. Thalassemia, also known as Cooley's Anemia, is caused by a malfunction of red blood cells, and the illness is passed on when both parents are unknowing carriers of the defect. Meanwhile, two Iranians convicted of raping two women and 17 girls were hanged in public in the northwestern province of Qazvin, newspaper reports said Sunday. Amir Sadami, 21, and Morteza Abdollahi, 22, were hanged Saturday in the presence of a small crowd, the Jomhuri Eslami paper reported. It said the pair lured their victims into an apartment they had rented and raped them last year. They were also convicted of drinking alcoholic beverages. |
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