“We need to increase the number of our descendants”, Erdogan said. Speaking to Turkish BBC, she said that only a family, and not a state, can decide whether to use birth control. “Who on earth could have the right to pressure families into having more children than they can provide for?”. No Muslim family can understand and accept that. Activists say access to abortions, which are legal in Turkey, has grown more hard for women under the watch of Erdogan’s ruling Justice and Development Party. Earlier this month, the president attended the high-profile marriage of his younger daughter Sumeyye to defence industrialist Selcuk Bayraktar. His elder daughter, Esra, and her husband, Berat Albayrak, the Energy Minister, have three children.
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A couple of days later, Turkey’s first lady praised the often-criticized harem of the Ottoman Empire as “a school for preparing women for life”.
“The goal is to muzzle any kind of criticism”, said Emma Sinclair-Webb, senior Turkey researcher at Human Rights Watch.
The controversial president said he believes it is the responsibility of “well-educated future mothers” to refuse contraception and contribute towards the growth of the Muslim society.
In a previous statement, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who is power in Turkey for last one decade, had equated birth control with treason.
Turkey’s population rose to 78.74 million a year ago. As a point of comparison, Germany’s population, which was close to 72 million in 1960, reached a population of approximately 80 million in 2014, increasing by only 10 percent during the same amount of time.
The latest furor comes in the wake of the formation of the country’s new cabinet, which includes only one female minister. Fatma Betul Sayan Kaya will head the family and social policy ministry, which is a role that has always gone to women.
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Erdogan’s wife Emine Monday spoke at a conference a on promoting women’s employment, saying “we should ensure gender equality”. As long as she doesn’t “re-offend” in the next five years, she will stay out of jail.
