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Reproduction, Health and Care in "Mother-Friendly" Turkey
Abstract
Alarmed by the skyrocketing C-section rates, the Turkish Ministry of Health (MoH) launched the "Mother-Friendly Hospital Program" in 2015. In the following years, the MoH has continued the program and several public hospitals have reorganized their services according to the National Mother-Friendly Hospital criteria. As of 2018, there are 42 mother-friendly hospitals in Turkey. Drawing from two years of ethnographic research in the first mother-friendly hospital of Istanbul, I raise the following questions in this paper: What exactly is mother-friendly reproductive healthcare in Turkey? What are the boundaries of mother-friendliness? What does being a mother-friendly hospital entail in a context where pronatalist population policy and neoliberal transformation in health are imbricated? What is the "logic of care" (Mol 2008) in mother friendliness? How is this mother-friendly reproductive care organized and practiced? Situating mother-friendly reproductive care within the overarching organization of the Turkish healthcare regime under the Health Transformation Program, I analyze the launch of performans sistemi (performance-based system), which organizes life at public hospitals based upon a meticulous calculation of performance and reproductive monitoring. In doing so, I demonstrate how mother-friendly healthcare materializes in medical settings, and illuminate how class, gendered citizenship and ethnicity are reproduced by over-medicalizing certain bodies and excluding certain rights.
Discipline
Anthropology
Geographic Area
Turkey
Sub Area
None