Birthing the Natural
Open Access DepositedReproductive Politics and Childbirth in Turkey
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Birthing the Natural
Reproductive Politics and Childbirth in Turkey examines the rise of the natural childbirth movement in Turkey and analyzes how birthing women and birth professionals reconfigure ‘the natural’ as a dynamic site of reproductive politics. Drawing on two years of patchwork ethnography conducted between 2015 and 2020 across hospitals, clinics, childbirth classes, midwifery networks, digital platforms, and archives, I trace how natural childbirth became both a personal practice of bodily and mental cultivation and a political terrain shaped by state pronatalism, neoliberal health reforms, and transnational flows of knowledge. I argue that natural childbirth in Turkey cannot be reduced to state-led pronatalist policies or neoliberal commodification, nor can it be understood as a purely apolitical return to biology. Rather, it operates as a threshold through which women and professionals negotiate embodied transformation, kinship, community, and visions of the future. Through birth psychology, childbirth pedagogies, homebirths, natural birth technologies, and invocations of ‘Anatolia,’ the movement generates new forms of subjectivity, professional identity, and political practice. By foregrounding the bodily, relational, and political configurations that natural childbirth produces, this dissertation contributes to anthropological debates on reproduction, the anthropology of the body, and feminist theory. It demonstrates how “the natural” emerges not as a fixed essence but as an open-ended process of becoming—at once deeply intimate and profoundly shaped by historical continuities, bureaucratic infrastructures, and transnational encounters. In doing so, it redefines “the natural” as dynamic and relational—between bodies and technologies, intimacy and governance, life and its infrastructures.
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