Increasingly, indoctrinated American college students agree that life would be better without the First Amendment. After all, that pesky First Amendment means that they are routinely exposed to ideas that frighten them or with which they disagree. What they fail to understand is that, once the government has the power to dictate what is acceptable speech and what is not, you discover yourself in a world like Iran, where the government plans to execute a pregnant woman for daring to burn a picture of the Ayatollah Khomenei.

This appalling report originated with IranWire:

Iranian judicial officials have sentenced a pregnant woman in her early-20s to death, and her execution is imminent, IranWire understands.

Shahla Abdi, an ethic Kurd from the northwestern province of West Azerbaijan, was arrested in Urmia in mid-October at the peak of nationwide protests triggered by the September death of Mahsa Amini in the custody of morality police.

Abdi is said to have received capital punishment for setting fire to a portrait of Ruhollah Khomeini, the founding father of the Islamic Republic.

A fellow woman inmate told IranWire that Abdi was held in Urmia Central Prison for about a month. Some prisoners say the young woman was transferred to Tabriz Prison about three weeks ago; according to others, she was taken to the detention center of the Ministry of Intelligence.

"When I saw this woman, she looked very young but weak and abused, and I realized that she was four months pregnant," the inmate said. 

Another inmate said that Abdi is 21 or 22 years old.

Image: A pregnant woman by gpointstudio.

This story is so surreal that I double-checked to see whether it’s been confirmed anywhere else. Daily Tribune/News of Bahrain, a regional outlet in the Middle East, has relied on IranWire to report the same story. Likewise, The National, a Canadian Broadcast Corporation outlet published in the UAE, has the same report. In other words, those geographically closest to the story believe it’s true.

Before I get to the bit about her being pregnant, keep in mind that the woman is not being executed for the blasphemous crime in Islam of harming an image of Mohamed. She’s about to be killed because she disrespected an image of a cleric/political leader. And that’s where a country without freedom of speech always ends up: It’s a tyranny and, when people speak out against the tyrant, no matter the form that speech takes, they must die.

In the West, even in the bad old days of people getting their hands cut off for theft and getting hanged or beheaded for murder, piracy, treason, and all sorts of other crimes, there was an exception for pregnant women: If they “pleaded their belly,” their sentence would be delayed until the infant was born as in the case of the female pirates Anne Bonny and Mary Read. A Judeo-Christian government would not knowingly execute an innocent child. The Mullahs who control Iran clearly have no such qualms about taking an innocent life.

Thinking about it, it occurs to me (and this is a frightening thought) that not only would today’s college students accept death as the price one pays for offending the government (providing that it’s a government they support), but they would also be comfortable with executing a pregnant woman. After all, those students who oppose free speech are the same students who insist that abortion should be freely available up to and after birth and who argue that a fetus is nothing more than an inanimate clump of cells.