In this intimate essay, Abrar Wadi examines how Iraqi personal status laws and norms reduce mothers to the role of caregivers—stripping them of legal guardianship and decision-making power in favour of absolute paternal authority.

In early 2025, just weeks after giving birth, I received a message from my employer requesting a birth certificate to complete my maternity leave paperwork. Because my husband works six days a week, I decided to go to the hospital myself to obtain the document. 

At the records office, I submitted my request. The clerk refused outright: “The instructions prohibit issuing the certificate to the mother.” 

I paused for a few seconds to register the absurdity of what I had just heard. I explained, repeatedly, that I was the child’s mother, that I needed the certificate to finalise my maternity leave, not the father, and that my husband could not attend. Nothing worked. 

I asked whether the instructions he referenced was written policy, or whether there was a law denying mothers this right. The response was firm, almost mechanical: verbal instructions, recently issued by hospital management, prohibiting the release of birth certificates to mothers. 

After a long argument, the clerk sighed and said, without looking at me: 

“If the father is busy, let the grandfather or uncle come collect it.” 

The grandfather. Or the uncle!  

How could either of them have more right to my son than I do—his mother, who carried him, gave birth to him, and was standing there asking for a document to secure my maternity leave? 

Those days weighed heavily. I was a new mother, navigating physical recovery and postpartum depression, while following news of proposed amendments to Iraq’s personal status law, as though the state were sketching the boundaries of my motherhood before I had even begun to inhabit it. 

In the end, I left the hospital without the certificate. I called Mohammed Jumaa, a lawyer, to ask whether what had happened was lawful. He confirmed that the regulations cited by the clerk had any basis in Iraqi law. Rather, they were practices empowered by a legislative climate that entrenches male guardianship. 

“If the father is busy, let the grandfather or uncle come collect it.” 

The grandfather. Or the uncle!  

How could either of them have more right to my son than I do—his mother, who carried him, gave birth to him, and was standing there asking for a document to secure my maternity leave? 

Article 27 of Iraq’s Law on the Care of Minors (Law No. 78 of 1980) designates the father as the legal guardian of a minor, followed by the court. While this provision does not explicitly regulate every administrative procedure, it has come to shape a wide range of legal and bureaucratic practices, many of which have no legal basis but are nevertheless enforced as routine.  

In practice, Article 27 excludes on two fronts: in relation to the father, and in relation to the state. Rather than recognising mothers as default guardians in the father’s absence, the law vests the judiciary with discretionary power to assign guardianship. In doing so, the law institutionalises patriarchal norms. 

Under Iraqi law, mandatory guardianship assigned to the father grants him exclusive authority to issue and approve all official documents related to children, to decide on a minor’s travel, and to enroll them in school. Unlike custody, guardianship is a permanent legal status: it is unaffected by divorce or the breakdown of the marital relationship. Its reach extends even to unborn children. 

This legal privilege is not abstract. It permeates daily life and appears in the smallest official transactions. 

The system rests on guardianship as a principle that automatically designates the man as the legal head of the family, granting him sole authority to represent the household before state institutions. My own experience illustrates this clearly. I live with my husband in my city, yet I am unable to obtain the most basic document proving my family’s residence there. 

When I applied for a residence card, a document meant to certify an individual’s place of residence and family unit, my application was rejected. The reason was simple: the law allows the document to be issued only to the “head of household,” meaning the man. 

My husband, in turn, was denied the card because his place of birth is registered in another city. As a result, we were collectively deprived of a basic legal document. 

Legal scholars Ziba Mir-Hosseini and Zina Anwar, founding members of the global Musawah network, describe guardianship as part of the “DNA of patriarchy” in Muslim family laws. Borrowing from Carol Gilligan, they identify gender dualism and hierarchy as patriarchy’s core components. 

Seen this way, guardianship sustains male authority across family life. It shapes practices ranging from polygamy and unequal inheritance to the routine denial of women’s legal authority over their own children.  

When I applied for a residence card, a document meant to certify an individual’s place of residence and family unit, my application was rejected. The reason was simple: the law allows the document to be issued only to the “head of household,” meaning the man. 

While Iraqi law has undergone numerous reforms over recent decades, the Law on the Care of Minors has remained largely intact, especially Article 27 governing mandatory guardianship. This persistence is often justified by framing guardianship as a principle derived from Islamic jurisprudence, which continues to serve as a primary source for personal status legislation. 

In contrast, Iraq’s Personal Status Law No. 188 of 1959 has been repeatedly amended, especially Article 57 on custody. Although mothers may retain custody until a child turns fifteen, depending on the child’s best interests, legal guardianship remains exclusively with the father. 

Legal guardianship, reserved exclusively for fathers, has increasingly been weaponised against custodial mothers, used to block children’s travel, deny them official documents, and exert control over women’s lives. 

By contrast, Tunisian law offers a different model. It expands the rights of custodial mothers, granting them guardianship powers related to travel, education, and financial management. This demonstrates that redistributing parental authority within family law is not only possible, but already practiced. 

Together, the rigidity of Article 27 and the repeated revisiting of Article 57 reveal a legal system that consistently reproduces traditional gender roles. Mothers are assigned daily care through custody, while fathers retain legal guardianship—and with it, the authority to represent children before the state. 

The Ja‘fari Code and the Production of the “Other” 

As part of a broader effort to reshape women’s place in society, Iraqi authorities have shifted from limiting women’s presence in public life to regulating their most intimate spaces. 

The Ja‘fari personal status code, crystallises this trajectory through a legal framework that restructures the family itself. While it curtails mothers’ rights in relation to their children, it expands the privileges of fathers. 

The code entrenches male guardianship in multiple provisions. Article 83 stipulates that maternal custody ends when a child reaches the age of seven and is automatically revoked if the mother remarries. In doing so, it discards the principle of the child’s best interests enshrined in Law No. 188 and sharply reduces judicial discretion. 

It also departs from the doctrine of complementary family roles rooted in religious jurisprudence. Instead, it advances a narrower vision of motherhood—one confined to breastfeeding and early childhood, after which the child is expected to enter the “world of men” under paternal guardianship. Motherhood is thus rendered fragile and provisional, expiring once the child’s physical dependence ends. 

Mir-Hosseini and Anwar analyse guardianship as an extension of qiwama (male authority), producing a patriarchal family model premised on male financial provision in exchange for female obedience. 

From this logic flows further authority, including the husband’s near-absolute power to dissolve the marriage. The Ja‘fari code explicitly endorses this power by abolishing judicial separation for women deemed “disobedient.” The amendment’s chief sponsor, MP Raed al-Maliki, framed this as a “deterrent punishment to force her back into obedience”—obedience, that is, to the husband. 

This structure extends beyond marriage into the father’s authority to arrange the marriage of minor children. Guardianship becomes an interlocking system of male privileges that reimagines the family not as a site of shared care, but as an institution of legal control. 

The impact of this code is not limited to legal authority; it reshapes the collective societal imagination. While social discourse insists on the mother’s “natural” presence as essential to childcare, the father’s absence immediately destabilises this belief. Maternal guardianship becomes inconceivable unless authority is symbolically returned to the father, even in his absence. 

The father is thus invoked as an absolute reference point, while the mother is confined to a temporary reproductive role that is revoked once a child turns seven or a woman remarries after divorce. 

Here, Simone de Beauvoir’s concept of woman as “the Other” becomes strikingly relevant. Women are not recognised as autonomous subjects but defined through unequal relations to men. Men are presumed to be self-sufficient bearers of natural authority; women’s rights exist only insofar as fathers allow them. 

The Ja‘fari code does not merely exclude mothers from practising motherhood, it reduces them to conduits for reproducing paternal lineage. Family becomes contingent on the man alone, and motherhood is redefined as a biological service to the father’s project, rather than a relationship in its own right. 

Within Iraq’s personal status framework, the father is treated as the absolute legal reference point, while the mother is confined to a temporary reproductive role—one that is curtailed once a child turns seven or revoked if a woman remarries after divorce. 

In the end, I return to my son, and to myself, and to this fragile definition of motherhood and its limits. A phrase spoken once by a relative echoes in my mind when my child nearly fell: “The child of a good family doesn’t get hurt”  

How did women come to internalise this, I wonder. 

I also recall the advice now circulating among young women anxious about the code’s consequences: “Choose the right man.” 

How did such a naive prescription come to be presented as the sole safeguard for women and motherhood? Can “choosing the right man” truly substitute for a legal system that protects women and children? Or does this logic merely normalise the absence of legal guarantees, accepting their erosion and seeking private safety in place of public rights? 

The clause on custody wages would be almost comic if it were not so ironically cruel: a payment men must make in exchange for women breastfeeding their own children. This clause makes me recall the faces of mothers separated from their children, exposing a legal system that sees mothers only as caregivers, never as rights-bearing parents.