This chapter investigates the medicalization and reconceptualization of pregnancy towards the end of the nineteenth century. In the previous two chapters, I examined the attempts to promote increased birth rates and to decrease maternal and infant death rates within the broader framework of Ottoman pronatalism. In order to achieve these goals, and in order to provide enhanced health services to Ottoman women during childbirth, the Ottoman state first sought to establish a medical basis through educating and licensing midwives and structuring a medical hierarchy. Simultaneously, as part of the combat against population decline, abortion was banned on the premises that it was the main factor responsible for the diminishing Ottoman population. Once these initial policies had been implemented, Ottoman pronatalists turned their attention to women, and initiated policies to regulate their maternal capability.

In this chapter I will shift my concentration away from the institutional and legal fields focused on in the Chapter 2 and 3, and turn to the rest of society, in order to analyse the medical and discursive ground on which the pronatalist battle was fought. This chapter discusses the subjection of pregnancy and childbirth to medical scrutiny. Despite the discourses emphasizing the benevolence, mercy and affection of the Ottoman sultan, decreasing the maternal and infant death rates, and saving the mothers’ and children's lives, was not merely a humanitarian, but a political issue, in the Ottoman Empire.