At this point, what the Taliban is doing to women is edging towards genocide:
According to UNICEF, only 66% of women in Afghanistan currently give birth with skilled personnel present. Furthermore, although official data is limited, maternal mortality in 2024 reached 638 deaths per 100,000 live births, and neonatal mortality reached 24 deaths per 1,000 live births â figures among the highest in the world, according to the UN.
In December 2024, the Taliban decreed that women could no longer attend centers offering medical and healthcare training. The ban abruptly ended years of study and professional aspirations for thousands of women, who saw this sector as one of the few remaining pockets of the labor market where the doors had not yet been closed to them.
âIt is completely unjustifiable and, unless reversed, will lead to unnecessary suffering, illness and death, and could amount to femicide,â the rapporteur added.
Claudio Miglietta, representative of Doctors Without Borders (MSF) in Afghanistan, explained to this newspaper that ârecruiting qualified Afghan female medical personnel has become increasingly difficult for some of their projectsâ in the country. According to Bennettâs report, women currently represent 27% of general practitioners, 18% of specialists, and 29% of nurses. These figures will continue to decline as female healthcare workers retire, leave the country, or simply give up on going to work every day.
âWe are not allowed to speak to hospital guards, drivers, or men in general unless absolutely necessary. If we do, intelligence officials come and interrogate us. The first time, they issue a warning; the second time, we will be dismissed from our job,â a health worker from Helmand province details in the UN report.
Since 2021, the Taliban have issued more than 130 edicts that progressively erase women from society, deprive them of education from the age of 12, and treat them as inferior beings without rights, even over their own bodies. The latest measure was a new penal code approved earlier this year that normalizes corporal punishment and establishes near-total impunity for abusive men. According to UN Women, 80% of Afghan women are now excluded from the workforce and education.
âI myself saw how they beat women at the hospital doors and wouldnât let them in. Days later, the Taliban said it wasnât true, that they had never established that rule, but it was because it was reported in the press,â Fariba says.
Fariba and Mariam also recall that most of the female doctors were not allowed to travel to the areas affected by the earthquake last September, and that meant that some injured women died waiting to be treated by a woman.
And all this is compounded by the reduction in the volume of international funds allocated to development aid, which particularly penalizes countries like Afghanistan, where the system was already extremely fragile and dependent on international support.
âFor women and girls, these cuts are turning an oppressive environment into a large-scale health catastrophe,â Bennett said, urging the international community to âreverse these policies.â
The Taliban is doing their darnedest to kill off all of their country's women. Which means that we're probably going to eventually start seeing young girls get forced into marriage and pregnancy, as well as impoverished women being kidnapped from other countries in a futile attempt to stave off population collapse. And, all that will do is just kill more girls and women and drive Afghanistan closer to extinction.
This is why misogyny is inherently unnatural and impractical. The human population literally cannot continue without women. The Taliban hate women so much that they are literally going to wipe themselves off the map in a generation because of it.
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