Exhausted Patients: Racialized Reproductive Experiences in Türkiye

Abstract This article demonstrates how women living in a politically unstable environment experience and negotiate politics of reproduction in a society within which their ethnic identity significantly shapes their position in the nation. Taking a cue from these women’s frequent use of the term “exhausted” to describe their reproductive experiences in Türkiye, this article analyzes the stratification of race, ethnicity, and reproduction in Türkiye. Using a long-term and multi-sited ethnographic approach, this article examines experiences with government-regulated reproduction alongside spatially-shaped identities to demonstrate the intersections of racially, historically, and regionally shaped heterogeneous reproductive injustices and patriarchal structures unveiled by the reproductive governance structure in Türkiye. The research finds that the country’s reproductive politics and political instability combine to create social and biotechnical stratifications in exercising reproductive rights that exhaust patients in the course of seeking reproductive care. By illustrating the complexity of reproductive experiences at the local and national level, this article contributes to developments and strategies of reproductive politics to reach reproductive rights for all, as suggested by the Cairo International Conference on Population and Development in 1994.