International Perspectives on Reproductive History

Scholars have paid a great deal of attention to the history of reproduction since Linda Gordon’s seminal 1976 work, Woman’s Body, Woman’s Right: Birth Control in America.¹ One consistent theme in the history of reproduction over the intervening decades has been how closely tied reproduction is to population control and state agendas. Leaders across temporal and geographic space have called for women to control their fertility to save the nation from race suicide, protect the planet from overpopulation, avoid war, and liberate women. Connections exist between contraceptive regulation and state formation in numerous countries, including India, France, Japan, China, Turkey, and the post-Civil War United States as it attempted to progress as a united nation.² In the late nineteenth century, for example, American states prohibited abortion in part to force white Protestant elite women to fulfill their duty to the nation to bring forth “proper” children in the face of large Catholic immigrant families. Ottoman officials similarly banned abortion to thwart Muslim fertility control that Christians rejected. By the mid-twentieth century, international organizations latched on to contraceptives as a simple solution to overpopulation and poverty in under-developed nations. Not until the late twentieth century was the International Women’s Health Coalition (IWHC) able to convince the United Nations to transform its efforts from reducing poverty through the regulation of birth rates to promoting reproductive health to secure medical care for indigent and rural women. The books under review by Balsoy, Ahluwalia, Parry, and Murphy expand upon these themes in a complimentary mode.

Balsoy applies a gendered lens to topics not dealt with in traditional Ottoman historiographies. Nineteenth-century demographic changes in the Ottoman Empire increased anxiety over the composition of the population. Nationalist rebellions, territorial losses, migrations, epidemics, high infant and maternal mortality rates, and widespread abortion led officials to deem population a human resource that was crucial to prosperity, military strength, and international competition. Fears about a declining population launched a pronatalist campaign that crossed legal, medical, institutional, and discursive grounds to transform the intimate into the political through state and medical attention to women’s bodies. The state, Balsoy argues, attempted to establish a homogeneous population earlier than historians have assumed: officials implemented a ban on abortion in 1838 to increase the Muslim population. She concludes that an Ottoman identity in fact implied a Muslim identity.

Ottoman regulation of reproduction began in the 1830s as the medicalization of pregnancy and childbirth brought the introduction of forceps (used only by male midwives and doctors), the opening of maternity hospitals, and the proliferation of prescriptive literature that claimed pregnancy and birth must be supervised by medical experts. Education and licensing requirements professionalized midwifery, beginning with the training of men at the new School of Medicine in 1839. When this program failed to increase the number of obstetricians, the state opened the Midwifery School in 1842 where women completed a four-month program in order to be licensed to practice. With the school located in Istanbul, however, few women made the journey and thus the state abandoned training and employed licensing only. Licensed midwives were integrated into the medical sphere, albeit at the bottom of the hierarchy. The state also intervened in reproduction by banning abortion in 1838 and treating infertility: both tactics were attempts to increase the Muslim population. Justifying the abortion ban based on...