ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the role of consent and bodily integrity in twentieth century abortion legislation. It emphasizes that the modern criminalization of abortion in the Ottoman Sultans Empire and Turkey was linked just as securely to fears of depopulation as it was linked to similar fears in states like France. As Lealle Ruhl argues, biology is held up in distinct opposition to lawa women reproductive capacity is specifically damaging to her legal identity as a citizen. The question of race suicide had become a pressing concern among intellectuals, and policy makers all over Europe and North America by the turn of the twentieth century, and biological purity, how to preserve it, and how to fortify it appeared regularly on the agendas of apprehensive national parliaments. The actuality of the late eighteenth century Ottoman Turkish race suicide thus became the foundation and backdrop for later discussions of the threat of race suicide on the part of European and North American populations.
