An Afghan female student walks out the Hayat Balkh Institute of Health Science in Mazar-i-Sharif on Dec. 8. Despair gripped Afghan women healthcare students after the Taliban government ordered, according to multiple sources, the exclusion of Afghan women from medical training, sparking panic across institutions. Since their return to power in 2021, the Taliban government has imposed reams of restrictions on women, making Afghanistan the only country in the world to ban girls from education after primary school.ATIF ARYAN/AFP/Getty Images
When Afghan women learning to become midwives showed up at an institute in Kabul for their classes last week, Taliban members holding automatic rifles were blocking the entrance. Other Taliban officers ordered the women to go home.
A 24-year-old student in her last semester of midwifery told The Globe and Mail that she and dozens of other young women begged the Taliban officials to let them finish their courses, telling them that in a few days they would take their final exams. One of the men, she said, told the students that their exams weren’t important – what was important was that they go home.
The Globe is not identifying students in this story, or the names of institutions they attended, because they are fearful of reprisals from the Taliban.
This was the first the students had learned of a new Taliban edict banning women from attending institutions where they have learned crucial medical skills in midwifery and nursing. This was the only form of higher education left for women in Afghanistan. Since sweeping to power in the country in 2021, the Taliban’s strict Islamist regime has banned girls from going to school past Grade 6, and women from attending university.
Human Rights Watch said in a statement last week that the Taliban had also banned women from accessing medical treatment from men in some provinces. The rights group said preventing women from learning health care skills “will result in unnecessary pain, misery, sickness, and death for women forced to go without health care, as there won’t be female health care workers to treat them.”
Heather Barr, the interim deputy women’s rights director at Human Rights Watch, said the Taliban “are ready to have women die in pursuit of their vision of what they think is a perfect society.”
The 24-year-old student said there are few female doctors or midwives in the country, and she noted that childbirth-related deaths are common. According to the World Health Organization, the maternal mortality rate in Afghanistan was 620 women out of every 100,000 live births in 2020. The comparable rate in Canada in 2023 was just over nine per 100,000 live births, according to Statistics Canada.
The student said that she had hoped to become a doctor, but enrolled at the institute in Kabul to become a midwife after the Taliban barred women from universities.
Every day, she said, she went to school feeling hopeful that she would be able to help vulnerable women in her country.
It was her last hope, she said.
She recalled crying on her way home the day the institute closed. Her father, she said, had been putting her through school on a meagre salary while the family ate dry bread. She shut herself in her room when she arrived at her parents’ house that day. When she emerged in the evening, she said, her mother and father were crying as well.
All she could think about, she said, was how she would spend her days now that she could no longer study. Many young women and girls have been forced to marry. This, she said, was her greatest fear.
Sima Samar, a human-rights activist who worked as a physician in Afghanistan and is now a visiting scholar at the Fletcher School at Tufts University, said child marriage will increase in Afghanistan as a result of the Taliban’s edicts, and so will mother and child mortality rates.
“I think it’s just complete abolishment of women from social life, from the community, and I think the normalization is a dangerous act. Everybody knows if there’s no women involvement within the family or society there will be no peace.”
In Kabul, at another private institute, a 23-year-old midwifery student said she showed up to school at 8 a.m. to find Taliban members preventing women from entering.
The young woman had previously been enrolled in medical school, but after the Taliban put an end to that she started studying to become a midwife. Like the other young woman, she was in her last semester. She said she started crying immediately.
She said she has begun to wish that she wasn’t born a woman.
When she made it home, she said, she and her mother cried together.
Each Taliban decree strips away more women’s rights, said another student who was studying midwifery. She had been going to university and wanted to be a prosecutor before the Taliban closed higher education to women.
The 25-year-old said that without work and education women are being degraded. It means half of Afghan society are in the dark, she said.
She added that Afghan women and girls need international help to undo the harm the Taliban have done.