Intimate Technologies of Family Making: Birth Control Politics in Cold War Turkey

In April 1965, the Turkish Parliament passed the law legalizing birth control, including the pills and the use of intrauterine devices. This article examines the beginnings and expansion of family planning in Turkey in the 1960s by tracing the encounters of American experts, Turkish physicians along with bureaucrats, and thousands of urban slum dwelling and rural women and men. Different from the previous historical accounts framing family planning as an insular and state-driven modernization project, it provides a transnational history of family planning in Turkey by unearthing intimate links between the discourses of development and histories of family, sexuality, and reproduction. By using Population Council documents, Turkish official papers, Parliament minutes, visual materials, and national and feminist press accounts, this article demonstrates that family planning practices with new technologies of contraceptives constituted often-neglected but indispensable components of infrastructure in the formation of technologies of governance in Turkey in Cold War context.