✍️ By: Hamia Naderi
As the world marks World Population Day on July 11 — a day emphasizing universal access to sexual and reproductive health — thousands of women and girls in Afghanistan still live a grim reality, where forced pregnancies, banned education, and denial of basic rights have turned their lives into an unending nightmare.
From shuttered family planning services and closed health clinics to silencing female teachers, everything has conspired to make women in one of the world’s most fragile demographic crises the silent victims of poverty, politics, and neglect.
“Year after year of pain and childbirth”
Rababa, a 34-year-old woman from the village of Shakran near Herat, is now a mother of seven, pregnant with her eighth. In their cramped mud house, there is hardly room to breathe.
With tired eyes she says:
“No doctor, no medicine, no peace. Every year, another birth, another pain. Nobody asks if I’m alive — or just a womb.”
Before the fall of the former government, Rababa visited the clinic once a month, where a female doctor and a local midwife helped her. When the Taliban came, the clinic closed, the doctor disappeared, and the midwife, under threats, stayed home.
Speaking of the night she hemorrhaged heavily, her voice drops:
“It was midnight, I was bleeding badly, but I didn’t dare go to town. I suffered until morning. Silent. Helpless.”
“Here, a woman means giving birth”
She explains how her husband refuses to let her see a doctor:
“He says a woman means giving birth. His mother had ten children, so why can’t I? When I say I don’t want to be pregnant again, he calls me useless.”
According to Rababa, in her village women get pregnant one after another, grow weaker, and die quietly. She adds tearfully:
“Last year, my neighbor died. The doctor said her womb ruptured. Just like me — baby after baby.”
The silence of teachers
But this crisis goes beyond forced pregnancies. Naheed, a former girls’ school teacher in western Herat, has been confined to her home for two years.
“I taught girls for years so they’d understand being a woman means having choices. But now, I’ve become like a shadow, lost in my own home.”
She recalls teaching her students about spacing pregnancies and the menstrual cycle, and how the girls listened eagerly.
“Now those same girls have become mothers without even knowing their own bodies. A body that hasn’t even known itself is now carrying another life.”
Naheed, who once spoke passionately about the right to choose and family planning, now says:
“Here, knowing is a crime. If anyone finds out I’m still talking about education, they’ll punish me and my husband.”
Teenage girls, forced into marriage
Shadia, a 16-year-old who just two years ago was a top ninth-grade student, now lives in fear of her future:
“My books are packed away. I just help my mother around the house. I just pray they won’t marry me off soon. Nobody asks what we want.”
She adds that she has never been taught even the basics about her body:
“My friend, who is younger than me, fell ill recently but was too embarrassed to say anything. None of us know what’s normal and what’s dangerous.”
Statistics that scream
According to the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), over 80% of Afghan women lacked regular access to family planning and reproductive health services in the past year.
UNESCO reports that after the Taliban takeover, more than 100,000 female teachers were dismissed and millions of girls were barred from education.
“Women came to build, not just to bear”
Naheed says with deep sorrow:
“If education doesn’t resume and women can’t reclaim their roles in awareness and guidance, Afghanistan won’t just face a population crisis; it will face a human catastrophe. Women didn’t come just to bear children — they came to build.”
