| This dissertation has explored the gendered ways in which the fear of depopulation was articulated in the mid- to late nineteenth century Ottoman society. In a period marked by huge demographic turbulence, bureaucrats and medical elites became increasingly anxious about the fate of the Ottoman population. They believed that population was a crucial economic resource and a precondition for military and international power. In order to counter balance depopulation brought about by territorial losses, migration movement, and epidemics, the Ottoman ruling elites sought ways to increase the fecundity of Ottoman women. The female reproductive functions were increasingly subjected to medical, institutional and legal control. Providing better health services during childbirth to decrease the maternal and infant death rates, criminalizing abortion and offering economic assistance to women to discourage abortion, and medicalizing pregnancy were the major components of Ottoman pro-natalism.;In this dissertation, I submit that the population policies of the nineteenth century were predominantly formulated through women's reproductive capacities and the female body. Although I do not focus on the quantitative aspect of demographic changes, the demographic transformations, and the pro-natalist battle fought to compensate the loss of population, constitute the immediate historical context of this dissertation. At the heart of this dissertation is the argument that in the late Ottoman history, pregnancy, childbirth, and abortion were not personal experiences but political subjects. In other words, by focusing on the transformation of midwifery, the anti-abortion debate, and the medicalization of pregnancy and childbirth, I gender the debates around the demographic transformations and demonstrate that the search of solutions to depopulation can only be made meaningful through an examination of the politics of female body. |
