Medical Figh

Abstract

Background: Abortion has never been a mere medical issue; rather, because of its widespread effects on the personal, social, economic, political and cultural matters has been almost globally noticed by governments in some way. The Therapeutic Abortion Act ratified by Islamic Assembly of Iran in 2005 followed by instruction of the Forensic Medicine Organization confirms this claim. Although, basically (ethically, religiously and legally) abortion is considered forbidden, but the Islamic jurisprudents following them, the Iranian legislator have regarded abortion as permissible in certain circumstances, due to the imposition of suffering and hardship on the religiously responsible persons and/or due to certain individual, social and other pathologies. Although the abortion due to “denegation of hardship” has been stipulated in the Act and the 5^th part of the legal definitions of the Forensic Medicine Instruction, but the issue of the mother’s hardship that is the most basic topic discussed by this paper   needs to be clarified more. Therefore, in this article it has been tried to examine some practical challenges of using Islamic rule of “denegation of hardships” (La Haraj) and some other implied rules of “compulsion” (Izterar) and “denegation of harmfulness” (La Darar).

Method: the study is a deep library-based one accompanied by some real case analysis through comparing with jurisprudential-legal principles and rules.