Turkish women are seeking illegal ways for abortion

​According to a law that came into force in 1983, abortion was legalized in Turkey. Research conducted in 2013 by Ankara-based Hacettepe University revealed that 14 percent of the women in this country have had at least one abortion in their lives.
Pregnancies until 10 weeks can be ended by abortion. Abortions in state hospitals are covered by the state's health insurance, but this is only on paper because the law is not implemented. 

According to research conducted by the Istanbul-based Kadir Has University's Gender and Women's Studies Research Center, only 7.8 percent of state hospitals provide abortion services no-questions-asked which is permitted by the current law, while 78 percent provide abortions only when there is a medical necessity for it. 

Of the 58 teaching and research hospitals in Turkey, only nine of them (15.5 percent) provide abortion care no-questions-asked, 38 (65.5 percent) will do the procedure if there is a medical necessity for it and 11 (11.4 percent) of the hospitals refuse to provide abortion services under any circumstance. 

There are two regions populated with a total of 1.5 million women of childbearing age where no state hospital provides abortion no-questions-asked.

Another research conducted jointly by 12 women's organizations last summer also revealed that access to the legal right of abortion did not exist in big cities, with the exception of a few hospitals. Some 74 of the 184 state hospitals in 12 provinces said they were providing abortion services, yet only nine hospitals in Ankara, Istanbul and İzmir carried out abortions without no-questions-asked and without making discrimination on whether the women were married or not.Women forced to resort to riskier methods