Most research on abortion in the late Ottoman Empire has focused on the Tanzimat era, when the Ottoman government issued a number of decrees beginning in 1838 criminalizing abortion. There has been comparatively less attention paid to the 20th century, specifically to the Young Turk era. Measures that were initiated during the Tanzimat targeted doctors, pharmacists, and midwives who performed abortions or who provided abortifacients. At the same time, these measures did not address women who had abortions themselves beyond warning them that they would face spiritual punishment in the afterlife. One possibility for this is that during the Tanzimat era, issues related to the so called-private sphere, such as the family, women, inheritance, and children were still considered to fall under the domain of Islamic law. Abortion was also considered part of the private sphere and subsequently treated as an issue best left to the Sharia. In the twentieth century, however, the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) took more aggressive centralizing measures against religious courts, culminating in the adoption of the 1917 Law of Family Rights. I suggest that abortion policy under the CUP must be understood against this backdrop. My research centers on a case study of a young woman named Şaziye and her own 1916 narrative that describes the circumstances which led to her child’s abortion. The analysis focuses on the female body as a site of contestation during the First World War and illustrates the Ottoman state’s increasingly large role in policing the female body. Şaziye’s narrative suggests that under the CUP, the female body itself was targeted for punishment in the event that a woman had an abortion, in contrast to the Tanzimat period. However, Ottoman attitudes toward questions on female sexuality and the female body were still ambivalent in practice. On the one hand, late Ottoman discourses of womanhood privileged women’s roles as wives and mothers, yet on the other, men who violated female bodies and who facilitated abortions faced inconsistent penalties from the state. As such, the research argues that the issue of abortion provides instructive insight into how wartime policies toward the body were gendered and offers a preliminary investigation into CUP policy on abortion and its differences with the Tanzimat period.