The final element of Ottoman pronatalism examined here is the medical and popular discourses on infertility. As I have mentioned throughout this book, Ottoman political power and the medical elites devoted most of their energy to increasing the birth rates and decreasing maternal and infant death rates, and they focused on encouraging women to give birth to more children. However, most of the policies implemented were based on the assumption that women already wanted to have children and that they were able to do so. What was left out of the scope of pronatalist policies until late century was the problem of infertility.

As discussed in the previous chapters, the fate of the population and the demographic anxieties were shaped by broader political contentions. By the end of the century, in the Ottoman lands, reproduction and female sexuality had turned into political phenomena, and they were no longer conceived as merely biological functions.