ABORTION IN AFGHANISTAN

'My mother crushed my stomach with a stone'

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A general view shows residential houses on a hillside in Afghanistan's capital Kabul. Even outside Taliban circles, the fear of being stigmatised, and arrested over abortion, is strong in Afghanistan's deeply conservative society.

(AFP FILE)

Afghanistan has one of the highest maternal and infant mortality rates in the world, with young women banned from training as midwives or nurses in medical schools

When Bahara was four months pregnant, she went to a Kabul hospital to beg for an abortion. "We're not allowed," a doctor told her. "If someone finds out, we will all end up in prison."

Abortion in Afghanistan is illegal and you can be locked up for having or assisting one.

But Bahara was desperate. Her jobless husband had ordered her to "find a solution" — he did not want a fifth daughter. "We can barely afford to feed" the girls as it is, Bahara, 35, told AFP. "If it was a boy, he could go to school and work."

But there are no such prospects for a girl, with women banned from secondary schools, universities and most jobs since the Taliban returned to power in 2021.

So Bahara took a neighbour's advice and bought — for the equivalent of two dollars — a herbal tea at the market made from a type of mallow that induces contractions.

The bleeding was so bad she had to go back to the hospital. "I told them that I had fallen, but they knew I was lying because I had no marks on my body. They were angry but did not report me," said the mother-of-four.

"They operated and removed the remains of the foetus. Since then I have felt very weak."

The plant she used can be "very risky", said ethnobotanist Guadalupe Maldonado Andrade from the California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. A wrong dose can cause organ damage and severe haemorrhaging.