In this work, I have explored the gendered ways in which the fear of depopulation was articulated in the mid to late nineteenth-century Ottoman society and discussed Ottoman pronatalism. In order to present the specificities of Ottoman pronatalism, I analysed the multiple devices through which women's bodies were subjected to medical, institutional and legal scrutiny as an integral part of the search for solutions to population loss. In my analysis of the meanings of gender in the pronatalist debates, I argued that political change, demographic transformation, the emerging notions of public health and medical developments were all overlapping processes. In this sense, this book seeks to discuss the meanings of political power, Ottoman identity and medicine through the lens of gender in late Ottoman society. In order to contextualize this broad problematic, it focuses its attention on the specific issues of the transformation of midwifery, the anti-abortion debate and the medicalization of pregnancy and childbirth, respectively.

Starting from the mid-nineteenth century, the previously female spheres of pregnancy, childbirth, abortion and infertility became topics of public debate. In this period, the fecundity of women, maternal death rates and the conditions before, during and after childbirth attracted the attention of a major portion of Ottoman statesmen and doctors. In addition, an array of new social practices accompanied and reinforced this attention.