The use of contraceptive methods in Turkey differs greatly. Empowerment of women in terms of better socioeconomic status, better education, modern and liberal attitudes towards women and family planning seem to reduce withdrawal use as the main method of contraception. The results suggest the need for education (particularly targeting young women and couples), information and provision of modern contraceptive services particularly for disadvantaged groups.
In the last decade, discourse on sexuality has proliferated more than ever in the political realm in Turkey. The discursive utilization of women's bodies and sexualities has appeared as the main tool to consolidate a conservative gender regime and the heterosexual family with children is promoted as the basic unit to reinforce hegemonic moral values and norms. This article aims to disentangle the intricate patchwork in the Justice and Development Party's (JDP) gender politics, which is geared towards ensuring pervasive control of women's bodies and sexualities. Within this framework, this article investigates the proliferation of the discourse on women's bodies and sexualities in Turkish politics by delving into the constitutive factors of the JDP's hegemonic gender politics and examining the narrative lines in recent public debates on women's sexualities.
This paper discusses the gendered nature of reproductive citizenship in contemporary Turkey through reading the abortion chronicles and exposes the utilization of women's bodies and subjection of women to demographic state policies. To this end, we focus on recent abortion debates originating from Prime Minister Erdoğan's statement on May 25, 2012 that suggested that "every abortion is a murder". Our paper is a qualitative analysis of the arguments of the members of the parliament following PM's statement on abortion. We documented and contextualized the recurrent themes; (1) abortion as a rhetorical tool, (2) trivialization of abortion, (3) medicalization of abortion, (4) abortion in the cases of rape, (5) abortion as an economic imperative. As a result, we unravel the gendered discursive limits of "pro-abortion" arguments in Turkey and reveal the frameworks within which the political debates are shaped when women's bodies, sexualities and reproductive capacities are at stake.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.