Transforming the Gendered Regime Through Reproductive Politics: Neoliberal Health Restructuring, The Debt Economy and Reproductive Rights in Turkey

Abstract

The “Health Transformation Program,” started by the AKP (Justice and Development Party) in 2003 in Turkey, is part of the global neoliberal “Health Sector Reforms-HSRs” which have been undertaken since the late 1980s and early 1990s with the support of World Bank advisers and reports, in various ‘developing’ countries such as Brazil, Mexico, South Korea, Taiwan, always with the rationale of a “health crisis” (increasing costs of health care), a need to prevent public corruption and bring “efficiency.” Similar to these other contexts, the Turkish health reform or health restructuring as we call it, comprised changes to finance mechanisms and provision of care and introduced a premium-based compulsory health coverage system. Alongside the neoliberal policies, there has also been a rise in the New Right under the AKP regime, which had at its center anti-women discourses, policies and implementations, including a pronatalist discourse and implementations and statements equating abortion with murder. To contribute to the existing feminist literature that analyzes the intricate links between capitalism, neoliberalism and gender, especially on connecting the latest stage of neoliberalism–the debt economy- to reproductive rights, we designed a multisite feminist research to investigate the effects of neoliberal health-structuring on reproductive rights in Turkey, France and the U.S. Our theoretical groundings are in transnational feminist theory and writings on the state of neoliberalism and the debt economy, especially those of Lazaratto and Berardi. In this paper, we discuss our findings in Turkey, especially the focus-group interviews with healthcare providers working in family health centers, in order to reveal how the gender regime in Turkey is being transformed via reproductive and body politics. Analyzing our existent data on Turkey in light of the writings on the debt economy, we observed the neoliberal mechanisms of the dismantling of the public/privatization and the creation of individual debt and quantification of care (as related to mathematization of life and language). We witnessed how these neoliberal mechanisms interact with the conservative discourse leading to the erosion of women’s rights to access contraceptive and abortion care in Turkey and a transformation of the gender regime through the alteration of its reproductive politics.