Turkey’s women face dangerous conditions to obtain legal abortion
“I thought I’d go to some sort of hospital. But instead, it was an apartment on the second floor of a three-story building. A man with a cigarette in hand opened the door. I entered an apartment with a living room and kitchen. The bathroom in what apparently was the parents’ bedroom had been converted into an abortion room. The operating table was filthy and covered in blood.”
Horror takes hold of Gul as she describes the place in Istanbul’s Alibeykoy district where she went to have her pregnancy terminated. What she encountered was one of Turkey’s illegal abortion clinics, often housed in converted apartments despite the procedure being legal in Turkey.
Turkish law states: “Until the end of the tenth week of pregnancy, as long as there are no concerns for the mother’s health, an abortion can be performed out at her request.” It also stipulates that in exceptional cases, terminations can be carried out until the twentieth week of pregnancy. But in reality, the situation is very different.
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Hospital procedures essentially nonexistent
DW attempted to contact several hospitals, but no representatives were willing to comment. Instead, only scarce information is available. For example, at a hospital in the Black Sea coastal city of Rize, abortions only be take place in exceptional cases. But there is no official justification for the stance, only the terse “We simply don’t do that.” At another public hospital in Nevsehir, central Anatolia, abortions are only carried out in cases deemed by a doctor to be particularly “dangerous to health.” A private hospital in Gaziantep, in eastern Turkey, openly states: “We are not allowed to carry out abortions. The ministry of health forbids it,” but the federal authority contradicts this claim by referring to the legal framework.
For 30 years, Nursen worked as a nurse. “Fewer and fewer abortions are taking place in public hospitals. Some say that the women would be able to access them, but then the hospitals then give women an appointment several weeks later. Hospitals that organize abortions can be put under pressure. The aim is to prevent abortions by altering the allocation of tasks within hospitals or by enforcing stricter controls of their budgets.”
Nursen, who is now retired, speaks of an incident in a public hospital on the Asian side of Istanbul: “An unmarried pregnant woman came to the hospital resolute to have an abortion. The head nurse and doctor then visited the woman at home and instead persuaded her to keep the baby. And that’s what she ended up doing.”
G. worked as a nurse in the maternity ward of a public hospital for two and a half years. She says women there were instead referred to private hospitals for terminations: “Women could not receive an abortion. Perhaps only they knew someone working in the hospital.”
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Abortions either impossible to find or impossible to finance
According to a study by Kadir Has University in Istanbul, public hospitals in 53 of Turkey’s 81 provinces reject an abortion request if it comes only at the pregnant woman’s request. In the regions near the Mediterranean and the Black Sea, abortions are no longer permitted in any hospitals. Across the entire country, only 7.8 percent of the total of 431 public hospitals allow abortions to be performed solely at the request of a woman and 11.8 percent refuse outright to perform the procedure as a matter of principle.
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Charting Turkey’s slide towards authoritarianism
July 2007: Abdullah Gul becomes Turkey’s first Islamist president
After years of free market reforms, Turkey’s transition slowly begins to reverse. Islamist Abdullah Gul’s candidacy as president in 2007 marks a clear shift away from secularist policies, and strains relations between the ruling AKP and the military. However, with broad support from both conservative Muslims and liberals, the AKP wins the parliamentary elections and Gul is elected president.
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Charting Turkey’s slide towards authoritarianism
September 2010: Constitutional reforms take hold
Then-Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan tables a constitutional reform increasing parliamentary control of the judiciary and army, effectively allowing the government to pick judges and senior military officials. The amendment, which is combined with measures also aimed at protecting child rights and the strengthening of the right to appeal, passed by a wide margin in a public referendum.
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Charting Turkey’s slide towards authoritarianism
May 2013: Dissent erupts in Gezi Park
Pent-up anger directed by young people at Erdogan, Gul and the Islamist-rooted AKP hits a boiling point in May 2013. The violent police breakup of a small sit-in aimed at protecting Istanbul’s Gezi Park spurs one of the fiercest anti-government protests in years. Eleven people are killed and more than 8,000 injured, before the demonstrations eventually peter out a month later.
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Charting Turkey’s slide towards authoritarianism
July 2015: Turkey relaunches crackdown against Kurds
A fragile ceasefire deal between the Turkish government and the Kurdish rebel PKK group breaks under the weight of tensions aggravated by the war in Syria. Military forces resume operations in the mostly Kurdish southeast of Turkey. In early 2016, the Kurdistan Freedom Hawks (TAK) — a breakaway PKK faction — claim responsibility for two bombings in Ankara, each killing 38 people.
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Charting Turkey’s slide towards authoritarianism
July 2016: Military coup attempt falls short
A military coup attempt against the government shakes Turkey to its core and briefly turns the country into a war zone. Some 260 civilians die in overnight clashes with the army across five major cities. Erdogan, however, rallies supporters and the following morning rebel soldiers are ambushed by thousands of civilians on the Bosporus Bridge. The troops eventually drop their guns and surrender.
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Charting Turkey’s slide towards authoritarianism
July 2016: President Erdogan enacts a state of emergency
In the aftermath of the failed coup, Erdogan announces a state of emergency, leading to arrests of tens of thousands of suspected coup sympathizers and political opponents. Among those detained are military and judiciary officials and elected representatives from the pro-Kurdish HDP party. The purge is later expanded to include civil servants, university officials and teachers.
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Charting Turkey’s slide towards authoritarianism
2016: Crackdown on the press
As part of Erdogan’s crackdown against supposed “terrorist sympathizers,” Turkey becomes one of the world’s leading jailers of journalists, according to Reporters Without Borders. The government shuts down around 110 media outlets in the year following the coup and imprisons more than 100 journalists, including German-Turkish correspondent Deniz Yücel.
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Charting Turkey’s slide towards authoritarianism
March 2017: AKP officials try to stoke support in Western Europe
With a referendum on expanding Erdogan’s presidential powers set for April 2016, AKP officials look to galvanize support among Turks living in Europe, particularly in Germany and the Netherlands. However, the Netherlands forbids Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu from landing in the country, while Germany opts to cancel two rallies. Erdogan accuses both countries of Nazi-style repression.
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Charting Turkey’s slide towards authoritarianism
April 2017: Erdogan clinches referendum vote
Erdogan narrowly wins the referendum vote expanding his power. As a result, Turkey’s parliamentary system is abolished in favor of a strong executive presidency. Erdogan is also allowed to remain in power potentially until 2029. However, international election monitors claim that opposition voices were muzzled and that media coverage was dominated by figures from the “yes” campaign.
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Charting Turkey’s slide towards authoritarianism
June 2018: Election wins secure Erdogan’s power
Erdogan secures a new five-year term and sweeping new executive powers after winning landmark elections on June 24. His AKP and their nationalist allies also win a majority in parliament. International observers criticize the vote, saying media coverage and emergency measures gave Erdogan and the AKP an “undue advantage” in the vote.
University lecturer Mary Lou O’Neil says this practice is very problematic. “If a woman is seeking an abortion but is unable to receive one, it is a violation of her rights. Women with little money have it particularly hard under the governmental restrictions.”
Another significant hurdle comes in terms of affordability: Even if a woman can access abortion, the costs of the procedure vary and are often far too expensive. A private clinic informed DW that it charges 900 Turkish lira (€150, $171) for procedures performed up until the sixth week of pregnancy; each additional week costs a further 100 lira. At this rate, a termination of a pregnancy after the tenth week costs 1,600 lira (approximately €270), which is no small sum in Turkey — a country where average household incomes are far below the European average and only around one-third of women are in the workforce.
A midwife in one of Istanbul’s public hospitals, who wishes to remain anonymous, points out that the state does not cover the costs of abortions performed at the woman’s request. She said the system governing who can perform abortions is complex and riddled with hurdles for hospitals, so they simply
“decide it is better not to carry them out.” The doctors are only able to perform an abortion if the welfare of the mother or child is at risk. Otherwise, the women are referred on to other hospitals or facilities.
Read more: Half of all abortions worldwide are unsafe
Women’s rights of the future at stake
Sule Dursun works in Turkey’s Foundation for Family Health and Planning. She cites political motivations as the reasons for the many restrictions women encounter: “Behind this de facto ban is panic because the population is no longer growing as quickly.”
In 2008, then-Prime Minister Erdogan declared that every woman should have at least three children. In 2012 he once again made his position clear: “To me, abortion is murder.” The Turkish government’s “Tenth Development Plan” — the Erdogan government’s 2014-2018 set of goals for the future of the country — paves the way for a gradual acceleration of population growth, a clear indication that the government is attempting to curb the country’s falling birth rates.
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But what does this mean for family planning awareness? Time and time again in her educational programs, Dursun meets women who are uninformed when it comes to contraception methods — also an issue that hospitals do not want to take up: “The atmosphere is increasingly conservative, and this is also reflected in the healthcare system. There is no information and, at the same time, a de facto ban on abortion. So women are simply stuck.”
Article source: https://www.dw.com/en/turkey-s-women-face-dangerous-conditions-to-obtain-legal-abortion/a-47257680