The Taliban have a truly brilliant plan for Afghanistan’s women: ban them from education past primary level, forbid them from universities, then slam the door shut on medical, nursing, and midwifery training as of late 2024. All while insisting that only female doctors & nurses can treat female patients, because decency and Islamic propriety demand strict gender segregation in healthcare.
Genius, really. What better way to “protect” women than to ensure that, within a few short years, there will be virtually no qualified Afghan women left to provide the very care their own rules require?
Male doctors cannot properly examine or treat women without risking violation of those same modesty rules and women often refuse or cannot access male providers anyway due to chaperone requirements and cultural barriers. So the Taliban have engineered a perfect catch-22: no male care allowed in practice and now no new female providers being trained either.
Existing female healthcare workers are ageing out, burning out, or fleeing the country if they can. Current female medical students were turfed out mid-training. Midwifery and nursing programmes, already scarce, are now closed entirely.
The predictable result? Skyrocketing maternal mortality, untreated gynaecological conditions, women dying in childbirth or from preventable complications because no female professional is available nearby and rural areas turning into death traps for half the population.
Yet the Taliban still claim this is all for women’s honour and protection. One might almost admire the sheer audacity of the hypocrisy, were it not costing thousands of lives. They have decided that female illiteracy, poverty and death are preferable to the horror of a woman learning how to read, work, or save another woman’s life.
It is not merely cruel, it is spectacularly self-defeating lunacy dressed up as piety.
The rest of the world watches, issues statements, and occasionally wrings its hands, while Afghan women pay the price for this masterclass in regressive logic.
The Taliban really are as stupid as they look.
@spfl_talks@ggh1992 Surely it’s evident that we have high sex crime rates amongst our native population, why on earth would we want to import more people who have a higher likelihood of committing a sex crime? We have enough of our own sex offenders why wouldn’t you want to prevent more?
Nobody is claiming that ONLY migrants commit sex crime.
But migrants DO commit a disproportionate amount of sex crime relative to population.
Yes, we already have British sex criminals. We don’t need any more!
How can a feminist group not want basic safety for women & girls?