Ecological Model of Health in Understanding Refugee Women’s Access to Maternal Care Services in Türkiye

This paper analyses refugee women’s experiences of accessing maternal care services in Türkiye. By using the human rights framework, the paper adopts the ecological model of health and emphasises the vulnerability of refugee women due to their precarious legal status, social position, gender and health status. The multi-faceted character of their vulnerability in the host country necessitates the research to take an intersectional analysis encompassing the multiple complexities in studying refugee women’s fundamental right to maternal care. The ecological model (Thurston and Vissadjee, 2005) offers a normative and practical illustration of the complexities of interactions between maternal care and its determinants and outcomes. It allows us to analyse the interactions of networks through three stages: (1) micro-level (refugees’ interactions), (2) Meso-level (healthcare clinics/centres, community-level issues on health, etc.) and (3) macro-level (state policies and international agencies’ regulations). According to the UNHCR, refugees with little means cannot return to their origin countries, thus, the governments ought to (re)design their policies to create pathways for providing decent life. ‘Right to health’ is one of the fundamental human rights that every individual possesses as a member of common humanity regardless of their legal status in defined territories. States and non-state actors have a responsibility to provide and facilitate maternal healthcare to all women, including refugee women. The paper illustrates refugee women’s experiences of maternal care services in Türkiye by presenting research findings from the literature review and fieldwork data from participant observations in Turkish health services.