“If you are an unmarried pregnant woman, the Taliban have offered you a safe shelter, Then something is wrongShe wrote for The New Zealand Herald, where she told her story.
Medical facilities in Afghanistan are on the verge of collapse, posing enormous health risks to mother and baby, but Kabul is the only place Bellis can go besides New Zealand.
The journalist lives in Qatar, but it is not legal for an unmarried woman to become pregnant, forcing her to flee the country. Kabul is the home of her Belgian boyfriend, who is a photojournalist for the New York Times and currently the only place she is allowed to be.
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She is not allowed to enter her home country, because New Zealand is closing the borders for fear of the omikron variant of the coronavirus. The planned date for relaxing these rules is dangerously close to its due date in early May. Until then, New Zealand residents are entitled to exemptions on medical grounds, but Bellis’ application for this has been denied, because pregnancy is not a valid reason for the exemption.
“Tangled In Our Artificial Bases”
“At what point have we gotten so caught up in those rules we invented that we can’t see that I’m a New Zealander who needs help and should be able to go home?”
The United Nations estimates that tens of thousands of mothers and babies die in childbirth each year due to the collapse of health care in Afghanistan. “I ask the New Zealand government: What do you want me to do? Do you want me to give birth in Afghanistan?”
