Women in Afghanistan have been banned from training to become midwives in the latest crackdown unveiled by the Taliban.
Trainee midwifery students, who have been ordered to no longer attend classes, urged Taliban leaders to allow them to continue studying.
A director at leading global charity Human Rights Watch said the measures would lead to women and girls dying due to struggling to receive healthcare during childbirth.
Sources close to the Taliban’s Ministry of Public Health told BBC Radio 4’s World at One they have received orders to shut medical institutions to female students until further notice. Several midwifery institutions in different provinces in Afghanistan confirmed the ban is in place to the news outlet.
Heather Barr, interim women’s rights deputy director at Human Rights Watch, told The Independent: “This is closing one of the very few loopholes that was still left in the Taliban's ban on education for women and girls but it is also a particularly significant loophole because this will lead to women and girls dying.
“The Taliban have also banned women from being treated by male healthcare professionals and now what they are doing effectively is cutting off the pipeline of new female healthcare professionals.”
She warned the new measures are part of a wider pattern which sees the Taliban taking “more and more from women” and further restricting their lives.
Afghanistan has one of the highest rates of deaths in childbirth in the world – with one woman estimated to die every two hours.
“Let us breathe, let us live, let us study,” one woman in Afghanistan told the World at One.
This is closing one of the very few loopholes that was still left in the Taliban’s ban on education for women and girls but it is also a particularly significant loophole because this will lead to women and girls dying.
Mariam Aman, assistant editor from the BBC’s Afghan language service, said the implications were enormous, adding: “This immediate ban is impacting around 17,000 female student trainees.”
She said: “You can imagine five years down the line, women will be giving birth at home alone and there will be districts with no midwives and no access to health.”
A young woman living in western Afghanistan, who was stopped from attending university two years ago and now teaches English to girls, told the BBC she has a friend studying midwifery who has taken her exams and was close to graduating.
Her friend has told her the institute, which teaches girls nursing and other medicines, had been forced to shut its doors this morning, she added.
The Taliban, a hardline Islamist group which previously ruled the country, has blocked women from the workplace, education and public spaces, as well as barring them from taking part in all sports since seizing power after US and British forces withdrew in 2021.
Women in Taliban-ruled Afghanistan are currently prohibited from going to a salon, working out at the gym, and even speaking or praying in public.
Within a month of claiming Kabul, the Taliban’s education ministry banned girls and women from schools. The Taliban leaders also announced that the girls were barred from studying beyond the sixth grade – with the ban extended to colleges and universities in December 2022.
