The maternity ward standoff that exposes Taliban hypocrisy towards women

Yahoo

31-01-2025

Restrictive laws imposed by the Taliban last year mean women cannot train to become doctors or midwives in Afghanistan.
But this does not stop members of the strict Islamist group from bringing their pregnant wives to clinics and hospitals and demanding that only female healthcare professionals treat them, workers in the country have told The Telegraph.
Members of the Taliban want to be seen quickly, and tell medics that they expect high standards of care for their spouses.
'Everything is by force here,' said Feroza Tahiri, a midwife working at a public hospital in Nangarhar province. Despite this, 'we tell them you'll be seen like everyone else', she said.
Since the Taliban seized control of Afghanistan in 2021, the fundamentalist group has banned education for women and girls post-primary school. Women cannot go to parks, and beauty salons and other women-only spaces have closed.
The Taliban's laws have isolated the country internationally. This month, the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court applied for arrest warrants of Haibatullah Akhundzada, the Taliban's supreme leader, and chief justice Abdul Hakim Haqqani on the grounds of gender persecution.
Meanwhile, Ms Tahiri said women – including those working as senior doctors at the public hospitals – have left the country for Iran or Pakistan to prioritise their daughters' education.
After universities shut to women in 2022, Ms Tahiri's friends, with almost completed medical degrees, sought her advice on studying midwifery and nursing as she had done.
Ms Tahiri recalls her time as a student fondly: she said she lived in dorms with ambitious women from Takhar, Laghman, Nuristan and Kunar, and split her time between studying and working.
Her friends enrolled as a last resort, hoping to work as midwives – one of the few professions open to women under the Taliban regime. But they were too late, the Taliban shut the colleges in 2024. 'Now they're home and frustrated,' said Tahiri.
Ms Tahiri and her male guardian (women are not permitted to go out unaccompanied) do not speak much during their thirty minute rickshaw ride to her work. Instead, Tahiri recalls a time when there were women visible in public. 'They looked so good,' she told The Telegraph.
The maternity department she works in is staffed by women. Pregnant patients arrive with two or three other women, with one going back and forth, relaying information. Their husbands wait outside, but they 'make decisions' on health procedures, Ms Tahiri explained.
At a private clinic in Kabul, the Talibs do not need to announce themselves.
'We know from their guns and everything,' Samar Zia, a nurse in Kabul, said.
Despite the Taliban implementing the ban, they want their female family to be treated by women doctors and nurses, asking any male doctor present to step outside.
Ms Zia said she thinks that for many of these women and their Talib husbands, it is their first time seeking medical treatment. But the men don't really trust the doctors, she said.
One woman needed an operation, but her husband, a Taliban fighter, refused. Despite seeking medical treatment at the clinic, he questioned the diagnosis. 'I won't give my thumb print (permission). You're trying to do something else,' Ms Zia recalls him saying.
After the woman died, the man asked police to investigate the clinic, said Ms Zia.
She said some Talibs don't trust the staff, whom they know are not supporters of the militants. They claim the staff did not want Taliban families to reproduce.
At the Kabul clinic she works in, the Talibs walk in and interact with the women working there. 'You're there trying to do an injection and they come right up telling you your hair is out,' Ms Zia said. 'Or they'll talk about our uniforms.'
The women they accompanied can have 'great chats with you if you're alone… but [the husbands] don't leave them alone'.
In Laghman, east of Kabul, the Taliban men can 'act like dictators'. But they 'wait outside' like the other husbands, said Nasima Hussaini, a midwife working at a public hospital.
'They're attentive,' Ms Hussaini said, 'toward their first wives… but especially when it's their second wife.'
'It's maternity care. Everyone's demand is that there's a woman doctor,' she adds.
The staff persuade patients to see male doctors when they can. 'We want it to be a woman doctor too, but we don't want your health to get worse,' Ms Hussaini tells them.
The country's economic collapse, a result of foreign aid cuts, sanctions and Taliban policies, is evident in the hospital.
The midwives The Telegraph spoke to described a perfect storm of under-resourced health facilities, desperately poor patients, and men making reproductive care choices for women.
The hospital Ms Hussaini works at is so under-resourced that staff sometimes ask patients to buy the blood, sold just outside the facility, that is needed for transfusions.
One pregnant woman's family could not afford to do so and she lost her pregnancy, Ms Zia said.
For at least two days staff and the patient's mother could not bear to tell the woman – telling her instead that the baby was alive and receiving oxygen, when in reality her baby had been stillborn.
This is a hospital for the poor. 'If someone has money they go private,' she said.
Shahla Karim, a midwife working at a public hospital in Kandahar said the same thing: 'Nobody with even a little money comes here.'
Working at a regional hospital, Ms Karim's patients are women from the districts of several southern provinces, in addition to Kandahar, the Taliban's heartland and where the group's emir lives.
Ms Karim described tense interactions between staff and patients. Some families felt they were stigmatised as Taliban supporters and that staff in the province's city, being more likely to disagree with the group, did not provide adequate care.
'The people from the districts have the wrong idea. They think we're against these people, that we don't want to save these women,' Ms Karim said.
Ms Hussaini, the midwife working in Laghman, said she goes to work to serve women and patients with no money who 'come and go with only the hope of god'.
'Every Afghan wants to know what's the endgame?' she said of the Taliban's policies.
She said nobody had any hope. 'Ask anyone and they'll tell you – Afghanistan's come to nothing.'
Ms Hussaini said every family had one son who left to find work in Pakistan or Iran. She wants to leave too. 'I always say if I were a boy I'd have taken the illegal route' out of the country.
She said she doesn't hold the Talibs who visit the hospital responsible for their group's governance. 'If you ask them they'll say it's their higher ups.'
'We regret this,' she said, 'that they look for women everywhere, but they've banned women from everything.'
The names in this story have been replaced with pseudonyms to protect the identities of the women.
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