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bg- bwenas gaming Who Will Deliver Afghan Women From Pain

Sara, 25, is a mother of two living in Band-e-Amir and suffers from low blood pressure (hypotension). She recently visited a nearby community health facility run by an interactional NGO in Yakawalang, a remote district in Bamyan, Afghanistan, where she has been receiving treatment. At the centre, Najiba, a midwife working with the NGO, has been caring for Sara. She earns her living through the clinic and works for women's maternal health.

The future of both women - and millions of others in Afghanistan - now hangs in the balance following the Taliban's recent diktats against women, banning them from studying in medical institutes or pursuing midwifery courses and from working for national or international NGOs.

Amreen * (name changed) devastated when she heard of the new ban. She had been training as a nurse and midwife in one of the centres the Taliban had been running in Badakhshan province and was just about to finish her course in December when the Taliban announced a bar on women from studying in nursing or midwifery courses, one of the only professions left for Afghan women to pursue since the Taliban took control in 2021.

“Since women were barred from university and higher education, I was training as a nurse to earn a living and help my family. I don’t know what I will do now,” she states. Amreen is one of thousands of women who were plunged into despair following the fresh blow against Afghan women’s right to exist. “Women are not allowed to attend secondary school, university and medical institutes. If we can’t even become nurses or midwives, who will we survive or earn? Moreover, who then will be responsible for providing healthcare and maternal services to Afghan women in future? Who will deliver Afghan babies and women from pain? Do we have no right to even survive now?,” Amreen asks.

Another former nursing student from Kabul who came from a family of gynaecologists said that most students were given a brief notice before implementing the ban. “For women, no profession of work is available any more. This is being done to ensure total financial dependency of women on their male relatives or on the morality police,” she said requesting anonymity.

In the days since the ban, many Afghan women have taken to streets in protest and even challenged the authorities with protests.

One viral video showed a student dressed in all black, wandering “aimlessly”, claiming to have been rendered “homeless”. Other videos depict young girls clad in full-body black veils, leaving their classrooms for the final time, uncertain if they would ever return.

Soon after the ban, on December 29, the Taliban re-issued its previous decree prohibiting women from working in national and international NGOs.

Since 2021, women in Afghanistan have been facing increased restrictions placed on their freedom of movement, access to education, and right to work.

Exiled Afghan women have been watching with horror the systematic and clinical restrictions that the Taliban-led government has been placing women, not only to restrict their voices in public, intellectual or academic world but also to erase women entirely from society. In fact, there have been efforts to isolate women not just from society or the public world but from each other as well.

Afghan-British activist Shabnam Nasimi, former Former Policy Advisor to Minister for Afghan Resettlement & Minister for Refugees in the UK, said on December 13 that over “1182 days since the Taliban banned teenage girls from school”. It has been “724 days since the Taliban banned women from going to university. Everyday a generation of women and girls is being lost”.

In September, the de facto authorities in Afghanistan enacted a stricter morality law which imposes extensive restrictions on women’s personal behaviour (and consequently their agency and independence), “effectively erasing women from public life and granting broad enforcement powers to the morality police,” a report by the UN Women noted.

The new “Law on the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice,” mandates women to cover their entire bodies and faces, and even forbids women’s voices in public. The law also prohibits women from interacting with non-Muslims, using public transport alone, and looking at men to whom they are not related by blood or marriage. Activists claim that the Taliban have banned the construction of windows that allow women to be seen in the kitchen or courtyard of neighboring houses.

“This law significantly deepens the already severe curtailment of the rights of Afghan women and girls, including requirements for women to cover their entire bodies and faces, and it forbids women’s voices in public,” UN Women noted.

BY Aunohita Mojumdar

Nasimi also adds that prohibiting women from working in NGOs is "a death sentence for million women whose survival depends on aid. So many women will be pushed into starvation".

She further added, "This isn't just about aid collapsing—it's an entire nation being forced into ruin...How much longer will the world stand by and watch?"

Other activists have called what’s happening in Afghanistan a “femicide”. Since taking over Afghanistan, the Taliban have subjected Afghan women and girls to over 70 edicts, directives, and decrees that essentially strip them of all fundamental rights.

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As per data collected by UN Women, “only 1 per cent of women surveyed feel like they have influence over decision-making in their communities; 64 per cent indicate that they do not feel safe leaving their homes by themselves compared to 2 per cent of men; and 8 per cent indicate knowing at least one woman or girl who has attempted suicide since August 2021”.

Now, the fresh bar on women from nursing and midwifery courses adds not only to the invisibilisation and eventual removal of women from public spaces but also puts the life of women patients in danger.

The public health system in Afghanistan has been under-resourced and over-burdened for years, and remains unable to meet people’s needs. Activists working in the region claim that this had been an issue well before 2021 when the Taliban took over. Patients often struggle to access even basic and/or preventive services, meaning their problems deteriorate and require more advanced treatment later on. An ineffectual or insufficient healthcare infrastructure is a problem for everyone including women.

When it comes to Afghan women, there are additional barriers of gender and conservative, male-dictated body politics, making the problem even more complex. Afghanistan has one of the highest maternal mortality rates in the world, with 638 deaths for every 100,000 live births in 2017, according to the UN. MSF medical staff in Afghanistan assisted over 45,260 deliveries in 2023. At present, thousands of women in Afghanistan are particularly at risk of dying from preventable causes related to pregnancy and childbirth. “A shortage of qualified female healthcare staff affects access to maternal healthcare,” Mickael Le Paih, MSF’s Country Representative in Afghanistan, says.

BY Ankita M Kumar

“Women make up 50 per cent of our medical staff in Afghanistan – over 1,420 of our doctors, nurses and other professionals are women,” says Paih. Many workers in some pediatric departments and therapeutic feeding centres are also women, as women and children make up most of the patients. “Female staff are especially important for maternal healthcare programmes, as maternity units are largely women-only spaces,” Paih adds. The healthcare activist further explains that many pregnant women can’t access antenatal or postnatal care and the health system struggles to treat women who experience complications in pregnancy.

Cultural factors also affect women’s agency. In Afghanistan, women are usually required to be accompanied by a family member (a male family member in case the woman has to travel long distances) when leaving the house. This can also restrict women’s access to healthcare. “Due to longstanding cultural practices a woman’s husbandbg- bwenas gaming, or in some cases her mother-in-law, are the ones to make the decision about whether to proceed with treatment,” Paih adds.

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