Pregnant Women in Faryab Face Life-Threatening Risks from Poverty and Lack of Healthcare

In the remote villages of Faryab Province, many pregnant women live with constant worry because healthcare facilities are either inadequate or completely absent. They describe how the lack of well-equipped health centers, long journeys to distant clinics, deep poverty, and limited family awareness of healthcare place enormous pressure on their lives and pregnancies.

Khalida (pseudonym), a mother from Kohistan District of Faryab Province, recounts her story in a voice heavy with pain. She says long roads and the absence of a nearby health center cost her two of her children, losses she still carries with her every day.

Khalida lives in the village of Maaq, far from the nearest clinic. Reaching medical help requires a journey that many women cannot make in time. She says countless women like her have lost their children, and sometimes their own lives, because of this same hardship. For years, she explains, people in this district have struggled with poor healthcare, yet no serious steps have been taken to build health centers or appoint trained midwives. Her greatest fear now is for the future of the girls and young women growing up in this area.

Another resident of Faryab Province describes the situation of pregnant women in remote areas as deeply alarming. He says that in many villages, a woman in labor has no way to reach a doctor, a reality that has turned childbirth into a dangerous and often deadly experience.

Sodaba Ebrahimi (pseudonym), a midwife working in Faryab Province, says pregnant women there face severe and ongoing challenges. She points to the shortage of properly equipped clinics, the lack of trained doctors and midwives, and the vast distances between villages and health centers as the main obstacles. She adds that poverty prevents many women from receiving regular prenatal checkups and from accessing nutritious food, leading to anemia, physical weakness, and higher risks for both mothers and newborns.

Sodaba explains that limited awareness of prenatal care often forces women to continue heavy physical labor or delays their visits to health centers. She also says that psychological pressure, stress, domestic violence, and the lack of social support take a serious toll on the physical and mental well-being of pregnant women.

She stresses that in some areas, harmful cultural beliefs discourage women from seeking medical care, placing both mother and child in danger. According to her, a healthy mother is the first step toward a healthy child.

These accounts come amid earlier reports from local sources in Qadis District of Badghis Province, where a woman died during childbirth because healthcare facilities were unavailable. Many health centers, weakened by limited resources or the absence of proper equipment, remain unable to provide essential medical services.

The United Nations Children’s Fund, UNICEF, has previously reported that more than one million pregnant and breastfeeding women in Afghanistan suffer from malnutrition and face restricted access to healthcare. The organization warns that Afghanistan remains one of the most dangerous countries in the world for newborns, children, and mothers, where reaching a hospital or medical center is still out of reach for most people.

You can read the Persian version of this report here:

زنان باردار در فاریاب؛ فقر و نبود خدمات صحی جان مادران و نوزادان را تهدید می‌کند