{"id":3098,"date":"2014-02-17T17:47:00","date_gmt":"2014-02-17T15:47:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/openasia.org\/en\/?p=3098"},"modified":"2014-02-17T17:47:00","modified_gmt":"2014-02-17T15:47:00","slug":"afghanistan-no-end-to-illegal-abortions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/openasia.org\/en\/2014\/02\/afghanistan-no-end-to-illegal-abortions\/","title":{"rendered":"Afghanistan: No end to illegal abortions"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"1392319715230.cached\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Source: Kilid Group
\nR<\/a>ead Media Release HERE<\/a><\/p>\n

By Khuja Basir Fetri and Zarghoona Salehi<\/em><\/p>\n

Desperate families are resorting to abortion in unsafe conditions, and abandoning new-borns, particularly female infants, in hospitals. It is not unusual to find an aborted foetus in city garbage dumps. An investigation by the Independent Media Consortium (IMC) Productions.*<\/p>\n

In Afghanistan, like in many countries in the world, women do not have the right to abortion unless there are life-threatening complications. Here doctors risk imprisonment or a fine not less than 12,000 Afs (210 USD) for performing an abortion even if it was done with the women\u2019s consent.<\/p>\n

Abortion laws make no concessions for survivors of rape or domestic abuse. The shame of sex outside marriage is so strong that a rape survivor has little chance of living a normal life, and is instead blamed for bringing dishonour to the family and tribe.<\/p>\n

In January 2009, the media reported the terrifying ordeal of a 14-year-old whose brother cut out her 5-month foetus with a razor blade, then stitched up the wound with string. Doctors in Bamyan discovered the truth when the sick girl was brought to hospital with a severely infected wound. Her 20-year-old brother was arrested, and the foetus was recovered. He said he was attempting to hide his sister\u2019s pregnancy. The man accused of raping the teen was a construction worker helping to build a school near her home.<\/p>\n

There are no official figures of unsafe abortions, but an official in the sanitation department of Kabul Municipality who was interviewed by IMC says some 70 aborted foetuses were found in landfills in the Gazak area of Bagrami district, Kabul province, in the past one year. Abdul Basir Akhundzada, who works as a manager in Gazak, told IMC that at least two or three foetuses are found in a month. For the last six years, all the garbage from Kabul, a city of five million, is transported and buried in two landfills here called Gazak-Part 1 and Gazak-Part 2.<\/p>\n

Sometimes the foetus is not fully formed. Some are nearly nine months. But in each case the cleaners bury the foetus according to Islamic funeral rites in a makeshift graveyard next to the landfill. The small, unmarked graves are easy to spot though some have been leveled by the passage of time.\u00a0According to Akhundzada, Kabul Municipality has been disposing hospital wastes elsewhere.
\nA municipal cleaner who did not want to be identified said foetuses have also been found in city garbage containers. He said he has been working for the last seven years, and there is not a month that they have not found \u201cthree to four foetuses in garbage skips in Kabul City\u201d.\u00a0Mohammad Rafie, a deputy director in the municipality\u2019s cleaning department, confirmed that aborted foetuses were found when skips were emptied into trucks taking waste to Gazak.\u00a0Recently the police were informed when the bodies of two newly-born infants were recovered from city rubbish dumps by Kabul Municipality staff. The staff here has been trained to report the matter to the police.<\/p>\n

Social prejudice<\/strong>
\nNasratullah, a student, told IMC the body of a new-born girl was found behind the buildings in Sharak Telayi township. Later local people and the police buried her in Shuhada Salehin graveyard.
\nNiaz Mohammad, a witness, thinks there are only two reasons why dead new-borns are left in the garbage: she may have been born out of wedlock, or rejected because she was female. \u201cSuch views are common,\u201d Mohammad observes. People in provinces outside the capital are also prejudiced, he adds.\u00a0Khadem Husain, the mayor of Bamyan City, claims aborted foetuses were found in garbage skips next to Bamyan University. But he did not give more details.\u00a0Mohammad Maroof Mukhtar, an appeals lawyer in the Attorney General\u2019s Office for Takhar province says two foetuses were found in farm land adjoining the provincial capital Taluqan.<\/p>\n

No option<\/strong>
\nIMC interviewed a young man who got the young woman he was in love with pregnant. The man who did not want to be identified said the pregnancy was confirmed through an ultrasound. However, none of the clinics they went to were prepared to perform an abortion except one which demanded 22,000 Afs (385 USD). The man was very remorseful of the situation he had put the woman in, and described it as an \u201cunforgivable sin\u201d. Had her family agreed to their marrying \u201cwe would never have aborted the foetus\u201d, he says.\u00a0Dr Mohammad Hashem Wahaj of the Wahaj Private Hospital, Kabul, says his hospital does not admit women unless there are life-threatening complications. According to him, women who cannot prove they are married are turned away when they come to the hospital for a pregnancy ultrasound.\u00a0Wahaj blames unintended pregnancies on moral corruption in society. He rues the influence of western culture on Afghan youth: the \u201cunlimited liberty\u201d given to women and men, and the raising of the age of marriage in the last decade.<\/p>\n

Dr Najia Alemi, a specialist in Kabul\u2019s government-run Rabia Balkhi Maternity Hospital, says government hospitals prohibit abortion but not private meical facilities. She wants the Ministry of Public Health (MoPH) to crack down on illegal abortion.\u00a0MoPH spokesman Dr Kaneshka Baktash Turkistani said the ministry was not aware of illegal abortions in private clinics.<\/p>\n

Islamic rites<\/strong>
\nDr Mohammad Ayaz Niazai, a lecturer in the Religious Studies Faculty of Kabul University, says the country\u2019s abortion laws adhere to Islam. To dump a foetus in the garbage is anti-Islam. It must be bathed, wrapped in white cloth, and buried, he adds.\u00a0Najibullah Zadran Babrakzai, responsible for protecting children\u2019s rights in the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC), believes \u201chuman rights and dignity are breached when the aborted foetus is not buried\u201d.<\/p>\n

Law enforcement<\/strong>
\nKabul Police chief General Mohammad Zahir Zahir says the police have not made any arrests for illegal abortion. Arrests have been made in cases where the husband and wife were estranged, and the wife resorted to abortion in unsafe conditions. Women take a deadly cocktail of medicines to force a miscarriage, or turn to midwives for help to terminate the pregnancy.\u00a0General Sayed Abdul Ghafar Sayedzada, provincial police chief of Herat, says no complaint has ever been filed for clandestine abortion practices. The police have been cracking down on moral corruption, and trying to arrest perpetrators, the general said.\u00a0Basir Azizi, a spokesperson in the Attorney General\u2019s (AG) Office, said there are cases under investigation of a wife who miscarried because she was beaten by her husband, and women with unintended pregnancies who aborted the foetus.\u00a0\u201cInvestigation has been completed in some cases and files sent to the court, which has taken a decision,\u201d Azizi said not giving any details.<\/p>\n

Abandoned infants<\/strong>
\nDr Fatema Nazari, a specialist at Rabia Balkhi Maternity Hospital said she has seen babies who were abandoned by mothers after the delivery. Often the reasons are the gender of the baby, and the parents\u2019 inability to provide for another child. The abandoned infants in Rabia Balkhi were handed over to the MoPH for adoption.\u00a0Nine new-born girls and two boys were left in three Kabul hospitals in the last 10 months, according to MoPH\u2019s Department of Curative Medicine.\u00a0Dr Nazari said a new-born baby girl was left at the back of her consulting room at the hospital last year.
\nMohammad Ajmal, a Kabul resident, said a neighbour in the 16th District found a female infant wrapped in a blanket in a graveyard in Tapa Maranjan. Ajmal and his wife who were childless adopted the baby.<\/p>\n

A worker, Abdul Qayum, in the 17th District, found a new-born baby boy in a garbage skip in Dewan Bigi area. The child, however, died because it was exposed to the bitter cold.
\nMirza Mohammad Reja, the head of the provincial health department of Kapisa, says unwanted babies are abandoned also in hospitals in his province. His counterpart in Nangarhar, Dr Baz Mohammad Sherzad, said there were two cases in the government hospital last year. In both cases the mothers died in childbirth, and the fathers were not ready to take their daughters home.
\nAfghanistan is one of the most dangerous places for a woman to be pregnant.\u00a0Maternal mortality rates are one of the highest in the world.\u00a0Mohammad Maroof Mukhtar, a lawyer in Takhar province, said a baby girl who was found in a garden in the state capital Taluqan four months ago, was handed over to a man called Jamaludin in Rustaq district. The decision was taken by an unnamed influential local.\u00a0Esmatullah from Raj village in Farah province says he found a 2-month-old infant on his way to the mosque. The boy is now with his neighbour Bismillah who has no children.<\/p>\n

Son obsession<\/strong>
\nA woman who gives birth to a daughter risks being beaten by her husband and his family members. Latifa, 35, a mother of six in the Qala-e-Zaman Khan area in Kabul, says after each birth she was brutally abused by her husband. \u201cMy husband told me to abort the foetus when the ultrasound showed it was female. But I don\u2019t want be considered a murderer on Judgment Day,\u201d Now Latifa is two-months pregnant with her seventh child. She hopes it will be a son or her husband has threatened to marry again.
\nHawa Alam Nuristani, a press officer at the AIHRC, says the obsession with sons is contrary to the Shariah and against Islam and human rights. The AG\u2019s Office has recorded some 8,000 cases since 2009 of heinous abuse when women bore girls or were infertile.<\/p>\n

(*) Independent Media Consortium is a joint initiative of Pajhwok Afghan News, The Killid Group (radio and print media), Saba Media Organisation (Saba TV-Radio Nawa networks) and Hasht-e-Subh. This storyt is part of a series of investigative reports on corruption and human rights cases.
\nA report by Pajhwok reporters Khuja Basir Fetri and Zarghoona Salehi, and edited by Azizi. The series editor is Abdul Qadeer Munsif.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Source: Kilid Group Read Media Release HERE By Khuja Basir Fetri and Zarghoona Salehi Desperate families are resorting to abortion in unsafe conditions, and abandoning new-borns, particularly female infants, in hospitals. It is not unusual […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":3102,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,90,88,49],"tags":[266,268,269],"class_list":["post-3098","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-afghanistan","category-editor-selection","category-slider","category-womens-rights","tag-afghanistan-women","tag-end-to-illegal-abortions","tag-womens-rights-violation","country-afghanistan","Documents-conventions"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/openasia.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3098","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/openasia.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/openasia.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/openasia.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/openasia.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3098"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/openasia.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3098\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3104,"href":"https:\/\/openasia.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3098\/revisions\/3104"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/openasia.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3102"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/openasia.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3098"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/openasia.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3098"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/openasia.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3098"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}