Global Roundup: Taliban Ban Women from Nursing & Midwifery Training, Iran Hijab & Chastity Law, Namibia 1st Woman President, Climate Talks Need Feminism, 1st African Woman to Curate Venice Biennale

Nurses caring for patients at Wazir Akbar Khan hospital in Kabul on September 1, 2021. Aamir Qureshi/AFP via Getty Images

The Taliban's supreme leader has ordered a ban on women attending nursing and midwifery institutes, closing a rare avenue they had to pursue an education beyond the sixth grade.

Human Rights Watch says the ban was ordered by Taliban leader Haibatullah Akhundzada and conveyed to the Ministry of Public Health on Monday, then communicated to private medical training institutes soon after.

Although the ban has yet to be formally announced, two government officials who spoke to NPR on condition of anonymity, because of the matter's sensitivity, confirmed it.

In addition, several nursing and midwifery students told NPR that this week, they were not allowed to attend classes.

The European Union has condemned the ban, while the United Nations chief mission in Afghanistan said it was "extremely concerned about a reported directive" that was preventing women and girls from attending private medical institutions.

This new decree — banning women from nursing and midwifery training — will result in unnecessary pain, misery, sickness and death for the women forced to go without health care. -Sahar Fetrat, Human Rights Watch

UNICEF Executive Director Catherine Russell has asked the Taliban government to continue to allow women to pursue medical education.

Without female providers, women are less likely to seek antenatal care during pregnancy and less likely to deliver their babies safely and in clinics. -Catherine Russell

A 22-year-old woman who spoke to NPR on condition of anonymity to avoid being identified by authorities said she had been studying economics but signed up for nursing classes, desperate to continue studying, after the Taliban banned all women from university study in 2022.

She rushed to her classes on Tuesday after word of the ban spread on social media, hoping it was a false rumor. She said the teachers were apologetic, "but unfortunately, we were not allowed to enter," she said. "Unfortunately, we could not do anything."

This is bad news for all Afghan people. Because men cannot become midwives in Afghanistan. -student

Even before this week's news, medical education institutions have found it challenging to include women in their student body.

"Medical schools have not been functioning as they should in the last three years," said Pashtana Durrani, founder of Learn Afghanistan, an organization operating secret schools in Afghanistan as well as a maternal health clinic that has trained midwives. "All they are doing now is closing any loopholes" of the ban on higher education for females, she said.

People often say that under the Taliban women are just left to reproduce. Well, now with this new ban, women are left to reproduce and then die on that same table because there will be nobody to help them. That's what it has come to. -Pashtana Durrani

Afghanistan is one of the most dangerous places in the world for a woman to give birth. According to a December 2023 statement from Stéphane Dujarric, spokesman for the U.N. Secretary-General, a woman dies every two hours across Afghanistan in birth-related complications.