Book contents
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- Dedication
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Besim Ömer and Writing the History of Midwifery and Childbirth
- 2 The Transformation of Midwifery
- 3 Abortion, Power and Agency
- 4 Pregnancy as a Site of Medical Intervention
- 5 Infertility as a Public Problem
- Conclusion: Gendering Nineteenth-Century Ottoman History
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
5 - Infertility as a Public Problem
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- Dedication
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Besim Ömer and Writing the History of Midwifery and Childbirth
- 2 The Transformation of Midwifery
- 3 Abortion, Power and Agency
- 4 Pregnancy as a Site of Medical Intervention
- 5 Infertility as a Public Problem
- Conclusion: Gendering Nineteenth-Century Ottoman History
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
Summary
validelikten mahrum kalmış olmak acısı daima zehirnak yerden katre ile damlayan bir cerehadır. Zan olunur ki kudret katre kadınların sine-i revhına boş kalmağa tahammül edemeyen bir beşik koymuştur.
(Being deprived of motherhood is like pus dripping drop by drop from the poisoned place. One feels it as if God had placed an empty cradle that cannot bear being empty to the lap of women.)
The final element of Ottoman pronatalism examined here is the medical and popular discourses on infertility. As I have mentioned throughout this book, Ottoman political power and the medical elites devoted most of their energy to increasing the birth rates and decreasing maternal and infant death rates, and they focused on encouraging women to give birth to more children. However, most of the policies implemented were based on the assumption that women already wanted to have children and that they were able to do so. What was left out of the scope of pronatalist policies until late century was the problem of infertility.
As discussed in the previous chapters, the fate of the population and the demographic anxieties were shaped by broader political contentions. By the end of the century, in the Ottoman lands, reproduction and female sexuality had turned into political phenomena, and they were no longer conceived as merely biological functions.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Politics of Reproduction in Ottoman Society, 1838–1900 , pp. 99 - 118Publisher: Pickering & ChattoFirst published in: 2014