Despite the Odds — Providing Reproductive Health Care to Afghan Women

The majority of women in Afghanistan have never seen a doctor. Twenty-three years of war destroyed the few existing health care facilities, and women's health has suffered from the violence of warfare, the lack of economic development, and the strengthening of Islamic fundamentalism.In 1982, in the midst of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, I graduated from Kabul University's School of Medicine. After only a four-month residency at the Wazir Akhbar Khan Hospital, I had to flee Kabul for central Afghanistan, where I had been born and which was not yet under Soviet control. I arrived in Jaghori with only . . .