Sara, a 37-year-old single woman living in Tehran, was among the many Iranians who went to bed on April 7 this year in fear of Donald Trump’s threat to “eradicate” Iranian civilization, not knowing what horrors the next day would bring.
“Many people went to bed embracing one another with the anxiety that tomorrow might never come, saying their goodbyes. I was one of those many. With a friend who had come to my home so we could share the fear of war together, we drank our last tea and embraced each other,” she recalled.
Yet that night, the bombs did not fall. “In the morning, I did not wake up to the announcement of a ceasefire, which everyone knew was fragile. Instead, I was awakened by a call from the welfare organization telling me, ‘Your child is ready.’”
Sara was informed that her application for temporary guardianship of a newborn abandoned in a hospital had been accepted. The baby, she was told, had been born prematurely and abandoned by her parents during the war. After receiving the call, Sara went to the hospital and took possession of the baby, whom she cared for at home for 40 days — a highly unorthodox arrangement in a country where temporary fostering and adoption both remain uncommon.
In Iran, around 6,000 children each year, from newborns to teenagers, are entrusted to the country’s child welfare organization due to being orphaned or neglected. For these children, the lack of care and attention they normally experience has been overridden by the urgent fear that they may be killed in U.S. and Israeli attacks on public buildings.
The recent war waged by the U.S., Israel and their allies against Iran began on Feb. 28, with the bombing of a school in Minab that killed 168 students, teachers and parents. In the ensuing attacks, dozens of hospitals and healthcare centers across the country were struck. At least one orphanage was also hit by bombs, resulting in the death of several children. Fearing for the fate of these orphans, government welfare organizations began working to place them into private homes in the hope that they would be safer from attack.
That pragmatic decision symbolized another step forward in a minor social revolution in Iran. Iran has some of the most stringent laws in the world for granting permanent guardianship of orphaned children. This strictness comes in part from the complex rules in Shiite Islam regarding adoption — including the obligation to transfer property and assets to an adopted child as well as, for example, a prohibition on bathing someone you are not related to. Iran’s centralized state welfare system also mandates oversight of the physical and psychological health of families seeking adoption, adding more layers of bureaucratic control. The process of approving couples (necessarily heterosexual, Shiite and financially stable enough to withstand court scrutiny) for permanent adoption can take 10 years, or even longer.
Although these measures are ultimately intended to maximize protection for abandoned children, they impose a considerable financial burden on the country’s welfare system. From late 2023, under mounting economic strain and facing the high costs of caring for orphaned and neglected children under court guardianship in state welfare institutions, Iran joined the ranks of countries employing a foster care system for abandoned children.
This new system meant that children without guardians could be hosted without the traditional requirement for transferring property rights. Single women over the age of 35 were also included among eligible candidates for fostering. Yet the vetting process remained lengthy, the categories of children eligible for the foster care system were very limited and oversight of temporary guardians was significant. War then changed the situation yet again.
“The war against Iran began around 10 a.m., when the children were at school. We were told we had to go pick them up because schools were going to close,” recalled Fatemeh, a childcare worker at one of Tehran’s welfare centers. “I was at work, and instead of picking up my own children, I went with other caregivers and the orphanage staff to pick up the institution’s children from school. I was more worried about these children than my own. After all, my husband, my parents, and my in‑laws were there to pick up and care for my children, but the institution’s children have no one.”
The impact of the war, which she described as “brutal,” added an additional psychological strain to children who were already among the most vulnerable in Iranian society.
“When the war began, every evening as our shift ended, the children would ask us, ‘Will you come back tomorrow?’ They would ask, ‘If they bomb the gas stations, will you have fuel to return here tomorrow?’ When the attacks grew very intense and buildings around us were hit, it felt as if the planes were flying right over our roof, and the children became frantic. In those moments, the older children would take the younger ones by the hand and hide under the desks. They were so desperate for family support that they played the role of family themselves,” she said.
“These are children who have sometimes witnessed their mother murdered by their father, who have been abandoned in the streets to collect trash, or who arrived here wounded and traumatized. They know they will have a hot meal here, they know someone will help them with their homework, they know these children and these institutions are all they have. War takes away even the assumption that they have the institution, and it deepens their anxiety.”
The chaotic situation into which orphanages and childcare centers were thrown by the war accelerated the process of placing children into foster homes. Before the war, foster parents could only take in children over the age of 7, those for whom the adoption demand was lower. The war pushed back this restriction, and the state welfare organization began entrusting more children, even newborns, to qualified foster homes.
The story of Sara, the woman who learned that her fostering request had been approved the morning after Trump’s threat, began here.
“When they told me the next day they wanted to entrust a newborn to me, I considered it God’s grace. They told me to go to one of Tehran’s welfare centers, where all the city’s abandoned infants had been taken,” she said. “It was the only infant care center with a basement and shelter, but even so, the anxieties were so great that they decided to place as many infants as possible with foster homes.”
The baby given to Sara had been born only two weeks earlier, and had just come out of the incubator. Her tiny hand was still bruised from the IV needle. She had lived the entirety of her short life in an incubator while the city was under attack, with nursing staff living in fear of what would happen if the power infrastructure was bombed.
The state welfare organization provided some basic supplies and economic assistance to take care of the newborn. Like most Iranians, Sara has to pay for an expensive virtual private network, or VPN, for internet access, but once she did, friends from across the world began finding ways to send her more help: money, baby clothes and supplies. Gradually, she began to settle into a new rhythm with what had, for now, become her child.
The baby had been given the name Sogand at birth at the hospital, meaning “vow” in Persian. When she was entrusted to Sara, she first called her Raha, meaning “free spirit,” but later thought Ahoo, meaning “gazelle,” suited her better.
The two shared many anxious nights together under the bombardment of the city by U.S. and Israeli warplanes. “We felt this anxiety, but my God is the God of Sufism, who holds everything in his power,” she said. “I believed that the God who was so careful as to protect a premature baby under the bombardment of Tehran, ensuring the electricity was not cut so the child would not suffer, and ensuring that in the first days of her life she would not be deprived of someone to touch her skin, surely that same God is careful enough to preserve the roof over my head when this baby comes beneath it, and to prevent another war from breaking out.”
But after several weeks of fostering, and building a bond with the baby, Sara received yet another fateful call from the welfare organization. This time, she was informed that her temporary guardianship had been completed, and that a permanent foster parent had been found.
“When you accept a child as a foster parent, they tell you this is a temporary situation. In the foster care system, you can keep the child for up to six months. If you want to become the child’s permanent guardian, the legal process is different, and I knew this from the very beginning,” she said. “But when, after 40 days, the welfare organization called me and said a permanent guardian had been found for the baby, I was walking in a park. I sat down on a bench and began to sob.”
“Those 40 days that the baby was under my roof felt to me like a sacred retreat, a spiritual seclusion. When they told me that this retreat was over, I was so shaken that I prayed with all my being that when I took the baby back, the parents they had found would change their minds and not want her,” she added. “But this child was so radiant, so beautiful, so sweet and endearing that they fell in love with her at first sight. The couple, who had been waiting 13 years for a child, completed the administrative process of guardianship transfer and took the baby from me, becoming her mother and father. They named her Baran, meaning rain.”
Not all children placed in the foster care system under the recent program have been so fortunate. At least one infant, whose name is listed among the more than 3,400 killed in the recent war, had been placed in one of the 8,000 homes in Tehran that were targeted, and was killed along with the entire family caring for her.
Sara donated all the belongings of the child she had cared for over 40 days to charity. The welfare officials, noting her attachment to the child, told her that if she wanted, she could take in another infant. For now, she declined. “Even though these 40 days were a spiritual journey for me, I prefer not to accept another child for now,” she said. “I feel I cannot be the mother of more than one child, and I consider myself the mother of the child I handed over. I do not want to plant another seed in this soil.”
Sara shared much of her experience as a temporary foster parent on social media during the war. Her posts became a sensation on corners of the Iranian internet, inviting curiosity as well as attacks by some who accused her of using her experience to generate attention, or even from supporters of exiled former crown prince Reza Pahlavi, who implied that her posts about ordinary life under bombardment in Tehran had somehow aided the Iranian government and diminished support for the war.
More than anything, though, the story of Sara and others who have fostered children during the war has driven widespread interest among other individuals and families about the possibility of doing the same. Posts on Iranian social media discussing her experience have also led to inquiries at child welfare agencies about the possibility of fostering more children to protect them from another outbreak of violence.
As the threat of a new phase of conflict looms, more taboos may yet be broken in a society still grappling with how to deal with the plight of abandoned children.
“If war comes again, I will gladly open my arms once more to hold another frightened child,” Sara said. “And this is something many others will do, too.”
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