With a de facto ban across much of Turkey, women are having to beg from hospital to hospital or seek private terminations – if they can afford it
Kadir Has university found that by 2020, there was not a single public hospital performing on-demand abortions in Istanbul.
The Guardian interviewed more than a dozen Turkish women who had all had abortions in the last three years. All said they were forced to seek terminations in private clinics, since public hospitals refused to perform the procedure. They said they were told in some hospitals that it was forbidden for them to carry out terminations.
Yet reproductive health activists say that, since then, many parts of the public health system have fallen into line with the government’s increasingly anti-abortion position, underlined by Erdoğan’s often-repeated wish that “every woman should have at least three children”. A private clinic told the Guardian that the fee for an abortion is about 3,000 liras , although prices increase with each passing week of pregnancy. This makes access to an abortion difficult for many women in a country where the minimum monthly wage is about £243 and only 30% of women of working age are in formal employment.
Ilknur was five weeks’ pregnant, and with the help of two friends called more than 20 public hospitals in Istanbul. All refused her an abortion. “I began to get really scared because I just presumed it would be straightforward,” she says. “I even talked to hospitals in other cities near Istanbul but found nothing.”Ilknur, private clinic patient
Ilknur was given a local anaesthetic but a few minutes into the procedure she felt a strong pain in her stomach that made her move her legs. “The doctor said to me: ‘Open your legs, this is nothing. If you have been able to open your legs to get pregnant, now you can too’.”Ilknur was stunned. “I just couldn’t look at him again. The nurse didn’t say a thing. I was so embarrassed.”
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