Abstract:
The current Turkish Family Medicine Model (FMM) has a specific mandate to monitor pregnant women supposedly to improve maternal and infant health indicators. The pregnancy-monitoring mandate is regulated through official employment contracts with family physicians and midwives/nurses that assign performance-based incentives and disincentives and warning-points schemas on their pregnancy-monitoring related tasks. This study illuminates the negative implications of the pregnancy-monitoring mandate in practice by drawing on interviews conducted with the FMM’s employed in the Family Health Clinics (FHCs). It argues that the FMM's formal regulation and operation, and its strategic application by the FHCs have important feminist implications. The FMM effectively functions as a means of Turkish state surveillance of women's reproductive health practices and sexuality. It also forms an additional patriarchal, disciplinary mechanism that strengthens the existing sexual control of Turkish women in the name of maternal health provision.
About the speaker:
Derya Güngör is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Sociology at Queen's University, conducting research for Inter Pares (Ottawa) through the Mitacs Partnership. She received her Ph.D. in Sociology from Queen's University in 2019. Dr. Güngör is also a volunteer researcher for the Kington Immigration Partnership.
Everyone welcome!
The Surveillance Studies Centre
c/o David Murakami Wood
Department of Criminology
University of Ottawa
Canada