The Politics of Reproduction in Ottoman Society, 1838–1900 by Gülhan Balsoy

Author:Gülhan Balsoy [Balsoy, Gülhan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, General, Medical
ISBN: 9781317320869
Google: VY5ECgAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2015-10-06T01:25:49+00:00

The Thin Line between Pronatalism and Eugenics: Pregnancy

Manuals and the Idea of Good Birth

The conceptualization of the female body as a ‘maternal body’ and the promotion of medical discipline during pregnancy were receiving a wider audience as the century closed and as Ottoman pronatalism was consolidated. Even one of the most profit- oriented figures of Ottoman print culture, Seyyid Mehmed Tahir Bey, published an advice book for pregnant women, which tellingly demonstrates the attention this genre received by the intellectuals and the literate public. Seyyid Mehmed Tahir was a prolific writer and publisher, who published quite a large number of books and periodicals targeting women, and written by women. He was the owner of the newspapers Malumat (Information) and Servet (Fortune), as well as the İtimat (Reliability) printing houses.61 Seyyid Mehmed Tahir had published extensively on topics such as women’s liberation, the equality of men and women, and the relations between men and women. However, his motivation was far from the emancipation of women, instead serving profit and self-interest.62 Thus, Seyyid Mehmed Tahir’s attentiveness of issues related to pregnancy and childbirth shows that texts instructing pregnant women were receiving an increasing audience and readership, and becoming quite popular in the context of late nineteenth early twentieth-century anxieties of depopulation. And topics related to women such as marriage, sexuality, women’s liberation and health started to appear more and more in print targeted at Ottoman women as well.63

The pregnancy manual prepared and published by Seyyid Mehmed Tahir, Vaz’ı Haml: İbtia-ı Hamil, Kabilenin Vazifesi, Cenin (Childbirth: The Beginning of Pregnancy, the Duties of the Midwife, Embryo and Fetus) is quite a short book of twenty-nine pages. This book is based on French and German sources that Seyyid Mehmed Tahir does not identify clearly, but we understand that this is mostly translation and summary of several books on the topic. Seyyid Mehmed Tahir clearly saw that advice literature on pregnancy and child care was becoming a profitable field, since he announced that he would be publishing several other books on the topic. Although it seems that he never published the successive works, he promised to cover issues such as false pregnancy, the determination of the sex of the baby, the changes in the body during pregnancy, the determination of the date of birth and hygiene during pregnancy.

Similar to the other books on this topic, the main problem of Seyyid Mehmed Tahir’s Vaz’ı Haml is the population question and the threat of depopulation on the Ottoman lands. At the very opening, Seyyid Mehmed Tahir notes that European cultures attach great value to the increase of population, and the Ottomans share this concern as can be testified by the Quran and other sacred writings. According to him, the religion Islam allowed polygamy in order to promote population growth. However, Seyyid Mehmed Tahir laments that the religious and humanitarian duty to produce a good number of offspring was largely disregarded in the Ottoman society despite the proclivities of Islam. He despises that most of his contemporaries have at most two children, while in the past men used to have twenty to thirty.

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