By :Rezvan Moghaddam

In yet another bloody link in the chain of domestic violence in Iran, on Sunday, April 20,
In 2025, a pregnant woman and her six-month-old fetus were brutally beaten and
murdered by her husband in Nehbandan, a county in South Khorasan Province. What
stands out most in this tragedy, as in many similar cases, is not only the horror of the
act itself, but the erasure of the victim’s identity in official reports and the systemic media
silence around the roots of such violence.
This murder did not claim just one life—it took two: the mother and her unborn child.
And it happened at a time when the woman was especially vulnerable—during
pregnancy. The violence was so severe that the miscarriage was not a side effect, but
an inherent part of the killing. This was not just abuse; it was an intentional act of deadly
force aimed at both lives.
Once again, the same empty and familiar phrase appears: “family disputes.” A phrase
that may seem neutral and harmless on the surface, but in reality, conceals lethal
patriarchal, controlling violence beneath a soft, sanitized cover. It’s a phrase that
essentially says: “This is a private matter. Don’t interfere.” But such killings are not
“disputes”; they are crimes against womanhood, against the right to live, and against
the female body.
Another striking aspect of this case is the concealment of the woman’s identity—the
deletion of her personhood by officials and state-controlled media. Nowhere in this
horrific report is the woman’s name mentioned, nor any detail of her life. Nothing about
the dreams of a mother-to-be, or about a woman whose only “crime” may have been
being married to a violent man. Reducing her to a nameless “pregnant woman” without
a past, a voice, or a story is part of the broader process of rendering femicide invisible in
the Islamic Republic’s media narrative.
In a country where laws protecting women are ineffective or nonexistent, where there
are no clear and deterrent punishments for domestic violence, where divorce is costly
and restricted for women, and where access to mental health and social support is
scarce, domestic abuse easily escalates to murder. In such a context, the violent man
knows that even if arrested, the media and judiciary will echo his version— “a family
dispute.”

The murder of this pregnant woman and her unborn child must be treated as a serious
alarm for society, lawmakers, and women’s rights advocates. As long as the media

continues using vague language, incomplete stories, and erases the identities of
victims and as long as the law fails to protect women, more killings will follow, and we
will be left waiting to hear the next woman’s name. Or worse, to never hear it at all.

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