Midwives of despair: The hidden cost of education bans in Afghanistan
Narges* was once a fourth-year Persian literature student with dreams of becoming a literature professor at Badakhshan University. Her room was filled with books she studied with passion. Today, that enthusiasm and hope are gone. The 24-year-old has packed away her books as if burying them along with her dreams. Not only has she lost interest in continuing her education, but, as she puts it, she has become “cold and dry” and cannot think of a bright future. With a lump in her throat and tears in her eyes, she says, “I worked so hard for my future and had such beautiful dreams, but I feel like I didn’t achieve my only dream … I cry day and night.”
Narges’s fate, like that of all girls in Afghanistan, changed after the Taliban returned to power. Narges and all other women were forced to stop their university education when the Taliban closed the doors of higher education to females in December 2022. Her depression deepened every day until a friend encouraged her to enroll in a midwifery institute, telling her, “You’ll get more tired staying at home every day. Since you have nothing else to do, go and study midwifery.” Six months ago, Narges followed her friend’s advice though this is not what she wanted to do with her life.
Narges’s story is just one example of the bitter reality being endured by Afghan girls and women. In the four provinces of Samangan, Badakhshan, Herat, and Parwan, Zan Times spoke with 10 girls who were forced to choose midwifery as the only profession open to them. Most turned to it merely to find a job and fill their time. In Parwan province, Madina* is now working at a clinic after graduating from a midwifery institute five months ago. She complains about the poor quality of education at the institutes: “We weren’t taught properly. We didn’t even have teachers for basic subjects, and the few teachers we did have just completed their hours and left.” She feels unprepared to be a midwife, saying, “Now that I have a job, most of the time I don’t know what to do.”
Dr. Maryam*, an obstetrician in northern Afghanistan, confirms that the healthcare system has severely deteriorated since the Taliban’s return to power. “Training people who have no interest in midwifery and not paying proper attention to their learning is playing with the lives of women giving birth,” she explains to Zan Times. “These Taliban actions have endangered the lives of mothers and newborns, increasing their mortality rates.”
The lack of higher female education and neglect of female healthcare by the Taliban regime are showing up in Afghanistan’s high maternal mortality rate. Though the Taliban does not release such data, frontline medical personnel tell Zan Times that those rates are much higher than before the Taliban returned to power, when the World Health Organization (WHO) described Afghanistan as one of the most dangerous places on earth for childbirth, where 8,700 women died during childbirth each year.
In Parwan province, Madina faced her first difficult childbirth soon after she started working as a midwife. She struggled to control the severe bleeding of a woman in labour, who survived only after a doctor intervened and cleaned the woman’s uterus. To Madina, this experience showed that she had not received a proper education or enough practical experience.
Narges also complains that she wasn’t properly trained: “The institute doesn’t pay serious attention to us. Many girls are in midwifery training but no one takes responsibility for us and they leave us to manage on our own.”
Meanwhile, women tell Zan Times that they have lost their newborns due to midwife errors. Ini Samangan province, Marzieh* lost her son after a day and night of severe pain. She complained of insufficient attention by medical professionals at Samangan Provincial Hospital, singling out midwives for their incompetence: “They don’t even know their right from their left, yet are here to deliver babies.”
Marzieh was carrying a boy, her first son after four daughters. “Because my baby wouldn’t be born, they pressed on my stomach and pulled the baby out with a machine. Then they said, ‘Your baby is sick, we don’t have the facilities here, take him to Mazar-e-Sharif.’” By the time she got him to a hospital in Balkh, the doctors discovered that the pressure used to deliver him was fatal. “You can’t even imagine how I traveled back from Balkh to Samangan with my dead baby.”
*Names have been changed to protect the identity of the interviewees and writer.
