What are we doing?

Roughly 75 percent of Afghan newborns that die do so because of lack of food, warmth, and care.

Unloved little girls fare the worst. In Afghanistan as a whole, a woman dies of pregnancy-related causes every 27 minutes – and perhaps even more frequently, because many such deaths go unrecorded. Many, perhaps most, are under sixteen years of age. In Kabul and Herat, mobile phones abound, a tooth-eroding concoction called ‘Afghan Cola’ is sold, the Internet works (sometimes), there are ATM machines, sophisticated heroin laboratories, four-wheel drive vehicles, five-star hotels, ads for private banks – all the trappings of globalised modernity.

Yet so many women die like flies, in pools of blood and deep-rooted indifference.

In Afghan society, discrimination begins at birth. One obvious reason is that a boy is destined to support his parents and much of his family all his life, and therefore represents a long-term investment, whereas a girl will be given over to her husband’s family as soon as possible.

Feeding a girl is seen as effectively looking after someone else’s property.

Once, I heard a dreadful story of a breech birth which a traditional midwife did not know how to handle. In the end, she wrenched the baby’s body out, severing it from its head, which remained inside the mother’s womb. It took six days to get the woman to a hospital in Jalalabad though it was not very far from where she lived. She somehow survived, with major health complications, including permanent fistula, which will condemn her to a life of exclusion from her family and unrelieved misery. As soon as the midwife saw that the baby was coming out feet forward, she must have known that there was little she could do to save either mother or baby. Even before that, she would have noticed that the child had not turned properly, and that major problems were on the way.

This means that someone – a husband or mother-in-law – had taken the decision not to send the young woman to the hospital, instead keeping her in inhuman suffering for nearly a week.

The solution is not just to build more hospitals, but also to change deep-rooted disdain for women. And, sadly, things have become worse in the past 30 years, as Afghanistan’s particular brand of Islam, combined with its legacy of dire poverty and war, compounds an already misogynist pre-Islamic tradition.

The central reason is despairingly simple: women’s lives are not valued, and even women themselves perceive their suffering as being unavoidable.

-CAROL MANN,director of FemAid in Paris

So what are we women doing about it?