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After she left for Canada, Yeganeh said, her husband was summoned to a courthouse in Tehran where he was met by members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, an ideological security force, who demanded to know where his wife was. Her husband asked what she was accused of and was told she had converted to Christianity, proselytized and was facing a death penalty.

Because of the translator at the IRB hearing not naming “the relevant anatomy,” the IRB adjudicator ruled she “has never performed a hymenoplasty.”

According to the IRB member, that meant the woman didn’t use Bible passages to comfort her patient, there was no angry family member seeking retribution and, hence, she was not facing persecution, prosecution or the death penalty in Iran.

The woman appealed the decision to the Federal Court of Canada.

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Justice E. Susan Elliott found the IRB member was unreasonably hung up on the word “hymen.”

The transcript of the hearing shows Yeganeh, through the translator, describing it without using the word.

“It’s like a curtain that is coming at the entrance of the vagina, under minor labia … And that virginity tissue is around the wall of the vagina, the two side… And then we use the thread for the stitches. And … and then we try to put together the tissues that’s been already damaged and fall apart,” the midwife said.

Elliott found that clear enough.

“In my view, that language is more descriptive than the technical English language term ‘hymen,’ which conveys no information as to the location of the body part in question or its function,” Elliott wrote in her decision, published this week.