Legal but not legitimate: recent anti-abortion policies in Turkey as a response to the crisis of social reproduction

The reproductive health services draft law of 2012 gave gynaecologists the right to withdraw from performing abortions on conscientious grounds. Further facilitating the social reorganization of abortion politics is a negative performance rating for contraception and abortion – an institutional regulation meaning wage cuts, loss of prestige and high risks for those offering such services. This fact, compounded by an absence of professional liability insurance for approvers and performers of abortion, has resulted in abortion services being de facto forbidden in numerous public hospitals. Thus, abortion has been considered legal (since 1983) but not legitimate (since 2012) in public hospitals. This paper will open up the debate on recent anti-abortion politics by elucidating their direct relation with the crisis of social reproduction and showing them to be state responses to overcome this crisis – by increasing the population and maintaining family-based provision of care. It will introduce the gender dimension of state as a new concept, thus opening fresh avenues via which to understand regional specifics within the plurality of global SR experiences, here applying this theoretical approach to Turkey’s recent reproductive incentives and abortion bans in considering how the patriarchal-capitalist state socially reshapes social reproduction. It will examine this by addressing how the state’s symbolic and material pressures on gynaecologists working in public hospitals affect their abortion services (whether performing or refusing). It will be delivered through field research employing a qualitative method and semi-structured expert interviews with gynaecologists – treated as sensitive data – who work in public-state hospitals.