After a corpse of a newborn was found in a garbage container in the Turkish city of Sivas, the provincial police directorate demanded Cumhuriyet University for the list of “the students who had the possibility of pregnancy”.
The official notice approved by the prosecution office asked the university for the list of the female students who were registered for the spring semester when the corpse was found.
While the female students are labelled as “usual suspects” and the actual perpetrator is deliberately ignored, the situation has demonstrated once again that the abortion ban is de facto enforced despite it is legal in Turkey.
ABORTION BAN IN SİVAS
A recent report has shown that abortion is not carried out in 53 cities of Turkey, including the city of Sivas where the police pursued female university students after a corpse of new-born had been found in a garbage container.
Anti-abortion and birth control-related policies of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) point to the actual perpetrators of unhealthy births and of the women who lose their health while they attempt to stop unplanned pregnancies.
Despite the current Population Planning Law provides women with the right to the abortion until the end of the tenth week of pregnancy upon the permission of the pregnant woman, many hospitals in Turkey arbitrarily lower the margin to 8 weeks or avoid the code of “abortion on permission”.
ABORTION AVOIDED EVEN UNDER MEDICAL NECESSITIES
The pressure and anti-abortion policies of AKP prevent the physicians from carrying out abortion operations even under medical necessities. A pregnant woman, Ayşe Kocaoğlu, who was shot by his boyfriend, was a concrete example of AKP’s anti-woman policies. Kocaoğlu was under the danger of losing her arm because of infection since she was not medicated due to her pregnancy. Despite the young woman demanded abortion, the doctor who avoided the abortion had to carry out the operation upon the women’s reactions.
Health Minister Recep Akdağ is known to have identified birth control as an outdated method and considered abortion an “ethical decision”, saying that a baby would be cared by the State if the mother suffered from a poor experience.
“Abortion is not a contraceptive precaution. Abortion is murder”, Director of Religious Affairs, Mehmet Görmez made a scandalous statement, calling the women who claim their self-determination on their own bodies as “murderers”.
