The regulation of abortion in contemporary Turkey : laws, policies, discourses

Abstract

In contrast to many places around the world, abortion has not been a major public issue in Turkey. It was legalized in 1983 without serious public pressure or debates, and the legalization has not triggered anti-abortionist reactions. However, this does not mean that all women have had access to safe abortion since then; and in recent years, receiving this service in public institutions has become increasingly difficult. Some attribute this to the AKP (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi - Justice and Development Party) government’s ongoing rule since 2002, and to its commonly assumed religious conservatism. In this thesis, relying on a research on abortion regulations and practices in contemporary Turkey, I contend that there is more to this situation than what this immediate causality proposes; and that what is at stake is a rather complex process of articulation between neoliberalism and neoconservatism. Although the discrepancies between abortion laws and actual abortion practices have been extensively studied in various countries at different historical periods, I suggest that focusing on this issue in contemporary Turkey is informative not only for its own sake because it is an understudied area, but also for revealing the insidious ways in which neoliberalism reshapes public health policies, and through them state-citizen relationships, by accentuating already existing inequalities ever more radically. As such, the thesis aims to contextualize women’s changing social status within the political transformations of the first decade of the twenty first century.