Busra Demirkol
"(Re)producing the Modern Ottoman Woman: Ottoman State Reform, New Medical Science, and the Policing of Women's Bodies in the Long Nineteenth Century"

Nineteenth-century understanding of the protection of women’s health as a compulsory requirement for the state (Mahmud II, 1838) paved the way for legitimizing the state control over the female body and criminalizing abortion as the safeguard of the social body in the late Ottoman period.

Focusing on this historical process of the transition of abortion from an intimate practice to a medically controlled public matter, this research investigates how women experienced this shift as both practitioners and patients. What were the consequences of being deprived of the tools and actors that made the practice of abortion possible for women in the late Ottoman Empire? What kind of sources, both socially and materially, have women resorted to dealing with the new conditions of marginality and criminality?

Through a relational historical approach, this study incorporates Ottoman Turkish and Ladino sources and examines the impact of pronatalist policies on women’s bodies from different ethnoreligious communities.