“’If my husband finds out, he’ll punish me,’” Mahmouda recalled the woman saying. “’I’m pregnant now. I really need those pills.’”
Taking birth control in secret is not unusual, the women said. Even Aziza’s own husband opposes her using it.
“He said: ‘We are Muslims and God gives us babies,’” she said.
She lies to him, but with a clear conscience.
“I talked to him in a good way,” she said. “I told him about the benefits, but he didn’t listen to me.”
Those who oppose it sometimes get violent. Aziza recalled people running her out of a neighborhood in Kabul after she introduced birth control there. They accused her of being on the payroll of the Americans, taking dollars to weaken the country.
“’They want to capture Afghanistan,’” she recalled that they said. “’If the Muslims are many, they won’t be able to.’”
In Mazar-i-Sharif, it is one mullah at a time.
Massoom, the mullah trainer, put it most directly.
“This is an Islamic country,” he said. “If the clerics support this, no one will oppose it.”
ADDITIONAL REPORTING BY SANGAR RAHIMI
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