Part four of this interesting (as always) Reporterre dossier begins as follows:

We need to go on a “belly strike” and put an end to “phallocratic rabbitry”, as ecofeminist activist Françoise d’Eaubonne put it with her usual verve in Le Féminisme ou la mort. That was in the 1970s.

For example, Africa as a whole consumes less energy than Spain and accounts for just 3% of greenhouse gas emissions, even though its population is growing at an explosive rate. It should also be noted that Africa’s birth rate is falling much faster than it is in Europe, with huge regional disparities that make any global approach complex, if not ultimately false.

In line with Françoise’s argument, the fourth part demonstrates the primacy of women’s decisions in the birth rate through an astonishing counter-intuitive example: the case of Iran, which has undergone one of the most rapid demographic transitions in history, going from 6.4 children per woman in 1986 to 2.3 in 2003.

The reason for this is a profound change in mentality initiated during the seventeen-month Islamic revolutionary days in 1979, in which women played a major part, and the proactive policies of Khomeini’s time, during which contraceptive methods and the possibility of tubal ligation and vasectomy were made available to the population.

Successive governments have gone in the opposite direction, but nothing has changed; for Iranian women, having more children is no longer an option, and the birth rate is not rising again..

Françoise, who has rightly been very concerned about the fate of women in this country, would be astonished. She would see in it a power of resistance in one of the worst patriarchal regimes on the planet, and certainly a sign of hope. (Translated by DeepL)