When Amina, a midwife in Afghanistan, visited a health centre in one of the central provinces recently, she saw a woman at the front gate holding a newborn. The baby was struggling to breathe, but the guards at the gate wouldn’t let them enter because the mother didn’t have a male chaperone. Citing sharia, Taliban authorities decreed in 2024 that, outside their homes, women must be accompanied by either their spouse or a close male relative, known as a mahram. Often, the policy trumps even life-or-death emergencies.
“When I saw that the newborn was taking his last breaths, I became extremely upset,” Amina recalls. (She asked to use a pseudonym to protect her safety.) Amina called the health centre’s pediatrician, pleading with him to allow the woman in and to treat the baby. The pediatrician hesitated, telling Amina that a Taliban representative was stationed at the health centre and that the doctor would be held responsible if he violated the mahram rule. By the time Amina persuaded staff to bring the baby into the centre and to start delivering oxygen, it was too late.
The child’s death is one of countless avoidable tragedies that Amina has witnessed over the past five years, all compounded, if not outright caused, by the Taliban’s decisions. The authorities have installed inexperienced administrators to lead medical centres, many demonstrating greater concern over upholding policies such as mahram requirements and dress codes than saving lives. In some places, social norms or even formal policies forbid women and girls from receiving medical care from men. When no female medical staff are available, male doctors don’t treat women or examine them directly; often, they instead speak to the mahram, who has to relay the patient’s symptoms.
The restrictions have been devastating for women and, by extension, young children. The regime has forced out thousands of health practitioners, many of them women, and no new female medical practitioners are being trained; in December 2024, the Taliban shut down midwifery schools and barred women from attending health-related training sessions. Unless those bans are reversed, there will be “unnecessary suffering, illness, and deaths”—what a February report from the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Afghanistan says, “could amount to femicide.”
By current estimates, there are between 11,000 and 15,000 midwives left in the country. Research by Maisam Najafizada, an associate professor of health policy at Memorial University in Newfoundland, projects that Afghanistan is on track to lose 5,400 female health care workers by 2030 and another 9,600 by 2035. If the political situation doesn’t change, Afghanistan will have no women in health care, including midwives, by the middle of the century. “This is a catastrophe,” he says.
Foreign aid, which once propped up the country’s gross domestic product and funded much of its health system, has largely dried up since the Taliban returned to power in 2021. Cuts to the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) in particular have dealt another massive blow; according to reporting in the New York Times, nearly $1 billion (US) in annual funding has “all but evaporated,” and hundreds of health facilities have closed as a result. According to a December 2025 report from the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, about one in three Afghanis live in underserved areas.
Shayma, a forty-five-year-old mother of four sons and three daughters, has to cross several Taliban checkpoints to reach the nearest hospital. She says she avoids seeking care and would rather live in pain. (She, too, asked to use a pseudonym for safety reasons.) This is not just because of the challenges of reaching a hospital but also what happens once she’s there: many of the male-dominated staff dismiss her as ignorant, often issuing prescriptions for medications she and her family can’t afford. “The doctors in the past were very respectful and behaved properly,” Shayma says. “Now, many Taliban employees who are in the hospitals treat us badly.”
Shayma recounts how one of her daughters-in-law lost her baby in childbirth at the hospital. When Shayma asked staff for an explanation, she says, “They told us that it was God’s will and there was nothing they could do.” For many of her daughters-in-law, it’s no longer worth having children.
Amina says the Taliban’s misogyny has become normalized in many families and become embedded in everyday beliefs about women’s bodies and medical care. She witnessed a woman die in childbirth shortly after relatives brought her to a health centre. When Amina asked why they had delayed seeking care, they told her, “Our mothers gave birth every year and had no special problems. She is no different from them. She should have delivered at home. Bringing a woman to a hospital is shameful.”
According to a 2025 United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) report, around one in three women gives birth at home, without a skilled attendant, raising the risk of death from complications. But those deaths are underreported, or simply not included at all, in the ministry of health’s records, says Noshin Guhar Karimi, a physician who works with the World Health Organization in Badakhshan province, in northeast Afghanistan. (Also not formally documented is the rise in women’s suicides, she says, many of which are likely due to increased domestic violence and the psychological effects of employment restrictions and school closures.)
Many women who survive childbirth endure severe economic hardship. Ongoing armed conflict with Pakistan, along with the return of hundreds of thousands of Afghans from that country and from Iran, are putting pressure on the economy and lowering household incomes. According to the World Food Program, around 17.4 million people—over a third of the population—faces severe hunger in 2026.
“We see mothers becoming more and more malnourished and facing many other health problems, but women are still forced to experience pregnancy and breastfeeding every year,” says Amina. Polygyny is on the rise, she adds, with families in poverty often marrying their young daughters to older men as second and third wives.
Amina sees women patients with children born less than a year apart. Many tell her their relatives forbid family planning methods, believing contraception to be a sin based on pronouncements from mosque leaders, local elders, and Taliban officials from the so-called ministry for the propagation of virtue and prevention of vice.
There’s also little attention paid to postnatal care for mothers, with just over one in three women getting medical attention following delivery. (The statistics are similar for infants, with around one in three getting medical checkups after birth.) The figures reflect authorities’ and popular views that women’s health matters little—that after childbirth, says Najafizada, “the function of the woman as the deliverer of the baby is now almost done.”
Women in health care work under severe duress. Amina recalls an incident with a midwife at a health centre whose patient had emergency complications in childbirth. The midwife had to rush her patient’s blood samples to the laboratory, then retrieve medicine from the pharmacy section. Along the way, Taliban soldiers from the ministry for the propagation of virtue and prevention of vice accosted her. They demanded to know why she’d ventured out of the women’s-only section of the health centre. The midwife tried to explain, to no avail; the soldiers beat her in full view of other staff and patients. “Yet this midwife,” says Amina, “still continues her work.”
