This report has been published in partnership with the Guardian.
Parwana* no longer recognises her own children. Once known in her Kandahar village for her beauty, the 36-year-old now sits on the floor of her mother’s home, rocking silently. After nine pregnancies and six miscarriages, many under pressure from her husband and in-laws, Parwana slipped into a permanent state of confusion.
“She is lost,” her mother Sharifa says. “They broke her with fear, with pregnancies, with violence.”
In Afghanistan today, her story is not an anomaly. Across Afghanistan, women speak of the same descent: pregnancies they cannot prevent, miscarriages they cannot treat, and violence they cannot escape. Since the Taliban’s informal birth-control ban began quietly sweeping through clinics in early 2023, contraceptives have disappeared, clinics have closed, and hunger has deepened. Interviews from seven provinces reveal a reproductive health system in free fall, where forced pregnancies, untreated complications, and relentless poverty now define daily life. Parwana’s story is just one face of a nationwide crisis.
When Shakiba*, 42, collapses beside the tandoor fire while baking bread, her toddler begins to cry. The mother of twelve from Kandahar cannot rise without feeling faint. Her hair falls out in handfuls. Her bones hurt constantly. She is pregnant again.
Her local clinic no longer offers contraceptives. Her husband forbids her from seeking them elsewhere.
She is one of the many women impacted by the Taliban’s quiet crackdown on family planning. The ban was never formally announced, but it was reported by the media in February 2023. Slowly and province by province, the Taliban are implementing this policy. By early 2023, doctors and midwives in multiple provinces reported the same pattern: supplies arriving late, then in smaller quantities, then not at all. However, this is not the case in all provinces. In Balkh, and Takhar, in some districts, birth control is still available.
In rural Jawzjan, a doctor who has run a clinic for three decades says the disappearance was rapid.
“After the Taliban came, the contraceptives started reducing. Within months, they were gone,” she says. “Before, at least 30 out of 70 women who came to the clinic needed birth control. Now we tell them: we have nothing.”
In Badghis, Taliban fighters arrived at a private clinic and ordered staff to destroy all contraceptives. “‘If we see you give this to women again, we will close your clinic,’ they said,” recalls the doctor. “We stopped immediately.”
Two years ago, after an earthquake left Zarghona*, 29, and family living in a tent, she went three days without access to a toilet and developed a life-threatening intestinal blockage. Surgeons did a surgery and warned her husband plainly: another pregnancy could kill her.
A year after her surgery, with no contraception available and a husband insisting he needed “a daughter” Zarghona became pregnant again. She spent nine months in fear, tried to end the pregnancy with herbs and saffron, and managed just one antenatal visit. When labour began, doctors in Herat told her both caesarean and natural delivery carried a high chance of death. She survived, but weeks later still bleeds, cannot sleep, and lives with constant pain.
Doctors say she must never be pregnant again. Yet there are no injections, no contraceptives exist in her area. “I reached death and came back,” she says. “But I’m still terrified. I have no way to protect myself.”
The ban on contraceptives is unfolding in a healthcare system already on the brink. According to the United Nations and the World Health Organization, more than 440 hospitals and clinics have closed or reduced services since international funding cuts in 2025.
For women in rural provinces, this means hours of walking or giving birth at home, often alone.
In Ghor, where villages are isolated by mountains and mud roads, midwives say women bleed for days before they reach a clinic. Some die on the way.
The reproductive crisis has become inseparable from economic collapse. Malnutrition now shapes every pregnancy. A doctor in Jawzjan estimates that 80 percent of pregnant and breastfeeding women she sees are malnourished.
“They have anaemia, vitamin deficiencies, low blood pressure. Their bodies are too weak to carry pregnancies safely.”
Domestic violence emerges again and again in women’s testimonies as both a cause of miscarriage and a method of control in households where women cannot escape, cannot seek shelter, and cannot access contraception.
In Kandahar, Reyhana* recounts how her sister Sakina*, a young widow, was forced by her in-laws to marry her brother-in-law. When she objected, they beat her repeatedly. “Each time they hit her, she bled,” Reyhana says. “She lost her baby.”
Midwife Hamida*, who works in a packed maternity ward in Kandahar, says violence is one of the leading causes of miscarriage she sees.
“Every 24 hours, we see over 100 deliveries — normal, premature, cesarean, and miscarriages,” she says. “About six miscarriages happen each day. Many are from beatings. Many are from women carrying heavy loads.”
In Herat, a woman explains that she miscarried after being beaten during a family dispute. In Badakhshan, Humaira*, 38, took abortion pills when she discovered she was pregnant with a girl. “My husband wanted a son,” she says. “If I gave birth to another daughter, he would beat me or divorce me. So I bought medicine secretly.”
The pills worked — but left her infertile, chronically bleeding, and terrified.
Her story is echoed by women in Kandahar and Jawzjan who described miscarriages that were either forced, self-induced, or the result of abuse after ultrasounds showed the fetus was female.
In Ghor, a 15-year-old girl miscarried after carrying two full jerrycans up a steep hill.
“I was ashamed to tell anyone,” she says. “By the time my mother saw me, it was too late.”
In remote Herat, Shamsia*, 38, says she worked in construction and brickmaking through her pregnancies. “My mother-in-law forced me to breastfeed her baby too,” she says. “I became weaker every day.” When the doctor told her she needed a blood transfusion, her family refused, calling it “haram.”
Before the ban, rural clinics held regular sessions on birth spacing. Now those programs have vanished.
“There is no purpose in giving awareness when there is no medicine,” a doctor in Jawzjan says. “The Taliban have not given written orders, but the fear is real. If we speak openly, they may shut us down.”
In households already shaped by poverty and violence, the loss of contraception has closed every exit for women. They cannot choose when to bear children. They cannot rest after birth. They cannot flee abuse. They cannot ensure their daughters’ safety. And as clinics close, they cannot even seek help.
*Names have been changed for security reasons.
*Sana Atef, Mahsa Elham, and Mahtab Safi are pseudonyms for female journalists in Afghanistan.
Freshta Ghani contributed to this report.
