This book examines the politicization of reproduction in the mid to late nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire. In a period marked by massive demographic changes that made the Ottoman state anxious about the fate of its population, female sexuality was increasingly subjected to medical and legal control. In this book, I investigate the ways this control shaped the female experience of pregnancy, childbirth and abortion. Through an examination of these three subject matters, I demonstrate that, in the late Ottoman history, reproduction was not a natural experience but instead a political subject.

I argue that the population policies of the nineteenth century were predominantly formulated through women's sexuality and the female body. Although I do not focus on the quantitative aspect of demographic changes, the demographic transformations and the pronatalist battle fought to compensate the loss of population constitute the immediate historical context of this book. Amidst a period of demographic turbulence brought about by territorial losses, migration movements and epidemics, the Ottoman ruling elites sought to eliminate those factors that reduced population and initiated policies to promote its further increase. To achieve these two complementary goals, the Ottoman government focused its attention on the fecundity of women, sought for ways to lower the high infant mortality rates and control the widespread occurrence of abortion, especially among the Muslim women of the empire.