Rebuilding Nation Implored to Boost Health, Education
Noreen S. Ahmed-Ullah
Tribune Staff Reporter
March 27, 2002

It will be critical to empower the women of Afghanistan as the international community helps rebuild a nation torn by war and religious extremism, a United Nations official said Tuesday.

Afghan women, who have the second-highest maternal mortality rate in the world, need improvements to their health, education and human rights, but they also need to feel safe, said Thoraya Obaid, executive director of the UN Population Fund.

"The women themselves stress that they have the most to gain from new opportunities and the most to lose if fragile communities break down," Obaid said in an interview, emphasizing a point she made in a speech before the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations.

On a visit to the region last month, Obaid, a Saudi native, met Afghanistan's interim minister of women's affairs, Sima Samar, who reported difficulty in coaxing women to come out of their homes, where they were largely confined under Taliban rule.

"Women did not throw away the purdah [the head-to-toe veil], not because they do not want to be free but because they want to feel secure," Obaid said.

Raising the social status of Afghan women, she said, will also mean recruiting support from Afghan men, especially as women strive for a role in the political process.

"Women have taken courageous steps in the past years," Obaid said. "They reopened schools in their homes. They worked in bakeries for food. The men have to recognize that women have given a great deal and it's their right to be part of the process of nation-building."

In Afghanistan, Obaid said, the deplorable quality of women's health is tied largely to the number of children they have and the lack of reproductive health care. The average Afghan woman is married at 16, lives to the age of 44 and has eight children.

But only 12 percent of women have access to such care. Under the oppressive regime of the Taliban, many female doctors fled the country. As a result, 1 in 5 women now die from pregnancy-related complications.

Working with the interim Afghan minister of public health, Obaid's organization has airlifted in medical supplies and equipment for three maternity hospitals in Kabul.

The Population Fund also hopes to address teaching women family planning--a touchy issue in the conservative Muslim world and for some Americans.

Obaid denies objections raised by U.S. anti-abortion groups that the UN organization is "promoting a culture of abortion" in Afghanistan. She says the Population Fund does not support abortion but instead teaches women about spacing children and contraceptive options.

It is a taboo subject, Obaid said, but the people of Afghanistan recognize its importance. She relates a story told to her by Samar, the Afghan minister:

A group of elders from a remote rural area visited Samar, crying as they told her about a woman who went insane after seven days in labor. There was no trained doctor or nearby clinic to help her. Eventually, she died.