The meeting, which took place on Friday, December 3, 2021, between 16.00-18.00, started with the speech of Selime Büyükgöze from the Purple Roof Women's Shelter Foundation. Selime Büyükgöze said, “In Turkey, optional abortion is still legal for up to 10 weeks. However, we see a huge gap between this legal right and the application of the law regarding abortion, as in many other areas. Today, we can also see that false information is given in many hospitals saying it is illegal and prohibited.” she said. In addition, “While talking about abortion, we need to talk about the control over women's bodies in this way, see the path from the relationship women have with their bodies and sexuality, to an unwanted pregnancy, and then read it as making it difficult for the state to terminate the unwanted pregnancy.” she added.
The meeting continued with the presentation of the report written by Nükhet Sirman and Feyza Akınerdem from Dissensus Research. Nükhet Sirman explained the framework of the research. Nükhet Sirman said, “We tried to draw a more holistic framework by looking at the relationship between the approach to abortion itself and the relationship between the approach to abortion and fertility and the woman's body. In other words, we tried to place abortion on fertility and fertility in the body.”. Then, Feyza Akınerdem started to speak and talked about the prominent findings in the report. Feyza Akınerdem pointed out that, “We saw that what women told about their own experiences holistically described patriarchy. Women want to make their own decisions about their bodies and get support and approval at this point.” in addition; she added that they often encounter the opposite. She stated that women could not make many decisions themselves, but they lived with the consequences of the decisions they could not make, that is, they were left alone.
Then, Aslı Elif Sakallı, from the Women's Human Rights - New Solutions Association, spoke, "While conducting this research, we wanted to understand how women approach abortion in the face of the criminalization of abortion, as well as how they think about the body, sexuality, and birth, and what they experience." said.
We hope that this research will contribute to the determination of women's experiences, perceptions, and feelings about the body, sexuality, childbirth, and abortion, to defend the legal but not accessible right to abortion in Turkey, and to fight and advocacy strategies with effective feminist methods. We also hope that the results of the research will strengthen our feminist struggle on the right to abortion and lead us to develop new strategies.
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You can reach the Youtube recording of the introductory meeting here:
