Afghanistan has one of the highest rates in the world of maternal mortality despite nearly two decades of effort to train more skilled providers and make maternity care more accessible. One contributing factor to this may be the quality and respectfulness of care provided. In this blog post, the authors of a newly published qualitative study in BMC Pregnancy and Childbirth discuss the contributions of healthcare providers to respectful maternity care and positive outcomes in light of narratives that depict them as either the ‘villains’ or the ‘victims’ of the system.