By Nazlan Ertan
In Turkish, çocuk simply means “child” — a small, willful person who believes the world should bend to their will. But in political life, çocuk is more than a noun: it is a litmus test. Unlike evlat, the solemn, Arabic-rooted term for “offspring,” çocuk suggests an individual, complete in themselves, not just a branch on a family tree. No surprise, then, that the AKP prefers evlat — a word that keeps people firmly tethered to family, lineage, and duty.
In the AKP’s worldview, women are primarily vessels, men are providers, and children are not individuals but the visible proof of a family's social virtue. There is less enthusiasm for women and children outside the safe confines of the family structure, as Turkey’s record on femicide, child labor, and workplace discrimination grimly demonstrates. Protecting them individually seems less urgent than promoting them collectively as symbols of national health. Harder, too.
This brings us to Health Minister Kemal Memişoğlu, who this week decided to clarify things. “If you don't have children, you're not a family,” he pronounced. “You're just husband and wife.” Social media, he grumbled, was full of dangerous ideas, but he would bravely stand by the truth. After all, he added, he worked “for Allah’s approval,” not for popularity.
With a few smug sentences, Memişoğlu managed to belittle every couple struggling with infertility, every parent mourning a child, and every pair who had made a different choice. Thousands took to social media to express their outrage: women and men who had spent years and fortunes chasing a pregnancy; others who had lost children and clung to their marriages for survival. Single mothers and women who chose not to have children addressed Memişoğlu with a few choice words, as well as many others who simply rejected the idea that private happiness needed a government certificate. Social media activists told Memişoğlu to worry less about bedrooms and more about hospital child care units that suffered a severe loss of confidence after a group of medical professionals created a healthcare scam that killed at least 10 newborns.
Journalist Fatih Altaylı, sharp as ever, called out the cruelty baked into Memişoğlu’s words. In a scathing column, he likened the minister to a bull crashing through a china shop of private griefs, and noted that the real problem wasn’t just Memişoğlu’s lack of empathy — it was the party’s silence. No senior AKP figure, not even the party’s Brussels-born Social Affairs and Family Minister Mahinur Özdemir Göktaş, attempted an apology. No one suggested that a minister should perhaps not declare half the country’s families null and void.
‘MISSING SOUL’
A day later, Memişoğlu tried to “clarify” his remarks during a visit to Yalova, where he chided the residents for the falling birthrates in town. Of course, married couples were families, he said, but children were what gave a family “its soul.” No offense intended. Just a gentle reminder that your marriage is spiritually incomplete until you produce a future taxpayer.
None of this is new. For two decades, the AKP has treated private life as a national project: urging early marriage, making divorce more challenging, condemning caesarean births, doling out tax incentives for third children and students who get married while still at university. As with most populist conservative governments, family life is not a private journey; it is a patriotic duty. If President Erdoğan could personally inspect every home for compliance, one suspects he might.
Nor is Turkey alone. As Newsweek recently reported, countries from Hungary to China are panicking over plummeting birth rates, dangling cash prizes and tax breaks to encourage marriage and procreation. The anxiety is less about human happiness than about national continuity: no weddings, no children, no future citizens.
Still, it is worth asking: If governments want children so badly, why aren’t they investing more in daycare centers, quality education or even child health?
And love, not conformity or state orders, is what makes a family.
