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The Taliban’s Laws Are Killing Women and Children

It’s nearly impossible for women to get health care in Afghanistan. The results have been catastrophic

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.

Current estimates suggest Afghanistan will have no women, including midwives, working in health care by 2050

Taliban decrees have barred women from accessing or delivering health care without a male guardian present

Afghanistan still relies largely on humanitarian aid for health care, but Taliban officials often shut down programming to train women

“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........

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