Şafak Kılıçtepe (Indiana University, Bloomington)
Reproductive Technologies, Pronatalism and Ethnicity: An Ethnography of Situated Reproduction in Turkey

Şafak Kılıçtepe is a Ph.D. candidate in sociocultural anthropology with a medical anthropological focus at Indiana University Bloomington. Her research focuses on minority women living in politically changing environments and their experiences with their infertility. By having an interdisciplinary approach, she specifically questions how the relationship between in vitro fertilization (IVF), political Islam, and changing ethnic-minority status shapes the reproductive experiences and negotiations of infertile Sunni Kurdish women living in Turkey. Turkey is a pronatalist country with one of the world’s fastest growing and tightly regulated IVF markets. Although the Turkish state funds the first three IVF attempts of certain infertile married couples, for women between the age of 23 and 39, they put legal penalties on third-party reproduction. Officials state that all these measures are to “protect the ‘racial purity’” (soyu korumak) of the nation and “Islamic principles.” However, how is the concept of race defined in a society that is ethnically and religiously diverse, and how do different groups living in Turkey experience this? For her dissertation project, reproductive technologies provide a lens to answer the following questions:

1) How do ethnic minority women – experiencing shifting politics and living in societies in which women’s socioeconomic status significantly depends on their fertility – respond to and make use of government-regulated IVF technology to achieve their own reproductive interests and validate their own gendered identities as women and mothers?

2) In what ways reproductive regulations affect the demographic dynamics at the local level?

3) How does the concept of race intersect with the definitions of gender, religion, ethnicity, and nation; and how does this, in turn, shape the experiences of individuals belonging to different groups regarding their reproduction?