Event

IUD Alliances: Transnational Politics of Family Planning in Cold War Turkey

In April 1965, the Turkish parliament passed the population planning law which ended the decades long pronatalist policies and legalized the use of birth control methods, including pills, the use of intrauterine devices (IUDs). Accepted with a small margin in the parliament, the Law led to political controversies and public debates in the mainstream media before and after its legislation. Despite the political tensions in the post-coup social and political context of 1960s Turkey, the law was quickly institutionalized, leading to formation of new vocabularies of reproduction and population that became the object of scientific studies by researchers from various universities in mid-1960s Turkey. Turkish authorities’ desires to disseminate family planning services in rural areas and newly emerging urban squatters, though, encountered various constraints. As a solution to budgetary, technological, and logistical shortfalls, Turkish authorities collaborated with the Population Council and Rockefeller Foundation (RF), two US-based organizations, to support family planning projects. A group of medical doctors, sociologists, and population experts joined a nation-wide family planning campaign and distributed birth control pills and IUDs to the hundreds of thousands of rural and urban poor families in Turkey. This talk explores the implications of the new technologies of family planning to understand making of family, sexuality, and subjectivity in Turkey in the 1960s. How did rural and urban poor women (and men) receive and respond to health experts, Turkish or American, knocking at their doors with new technologies of medicine? What work did birth control pills and IUDs do politically, socially, and culturally at the intersection of transnational anxieties and local endeavors regarding social development in Cold War Turkey?  What were the affective and practical implications of nascent medical technologies and apparatuses in the lives of rural and urban poor women (and men) in Turkey?