RASC News Agency: In the remote villages of Herat province, pregnant women and their newborns are facing life-threatening conditions due to the near-total absence of healthcare infrastructure and the acute shortage of female medical professionals. Local sources reported on Monday, July 7, that in many rural areas, women are deprived of even the most basic maternal health services, including prenatal checkups, safe childbirth assistance, and postnatal care. According to these sources, a growing number of women are forced to embark on long, arduous, and often costly journeys to reach medical centers in Herat city trips that, in some cases, prove fatal for either the mother, the child, or both. The lack of paved roads, absence of reliable transportation, and soaring travel costs have made access to emergency care nearly impossible for impoverished families in the countryside.
International organizations, including the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), have repeatedly warned that Afghanistan is witnessing a catastrophic rise in maternal mortality due to the collapse of primary healthcare services and the sharp decline in the number of active female health workers. Experts say that following the suspension of U.S. and international funding, nearly 400 healthcare centers across the country have been shut down depriving tens of thousands of women and children of their fundamental right to medical care. While healthcare shortages affect the entire country, the crisis in rural Herat is particularly acute. The near-total absence of female doctors in conservative districts has created a dire situation in which cultural and religious norms discourage women from seeking help from male physicians, further jeopardizing their health.
Under Taliban rule, this crisis has only worsened. The regime’s restrictions on women’s employment have decimated the female healthcare workforce. Qualified women once pillars of Afghanistan’s public health system have been driven out of their jobs, harassed into silence, or forced into exile. The Taliban’s regressive ideology has not only crippled medical infrastructure but has also condemned an entire generation of rural women to silence, suffering, and preventable death. Meanwhile, the international community has largely remained silent. Despite repeated warnings from humanitarian agencies, no significant action has been taken to restore life-saving healthcare access or to hold the Taliban accountable for its deliberate neglect of maternal and reproductive health.
“The current situation is not just a failure of governance; it is a moral catastrophe,” said one Herat-based health worker who asked to remain anonymous for safety reasons. “We are watching women die in childbirth for reasons that are entirely preventable and no one is listening.” With each passing day, more mothers die in silence, and more newborns are buried before they ever had a chance to live. In the absence of decisive international intervention and meaningful reform, the women of rural Herat and countless others across Afghanistan will continue to pay the ultimate price for a crisis that was neither natural nor inevitable, but politically manufactured and globally ignored.
