ABSTRACT
On March 8, 2008, during his speech for a panel on International Women’s Day, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan suggested that women should give birth to at least three children in order to ensure that Turkey has a young population in the years to come (Cetik, Gultekin, and Kusdemir 2008). Since then, this statement has been discussed extensively and criticized for its patronizing and interventionist approach to women’s reproductive decisions. However, Erdogan has repeated the same statement several times. It is not news that a politician in power makes statements about women’s reproduction in Turkey, particularly in relation to population politics, but in Erdogan’s case, he went as far as making statements on obstetric methods. In 2012, he also condemned abortion as being the same as murder, and he said that women should not give birth via C-sections because this limits their ability to give birth to more than two children (Milliyet 2012).
