Morally accounting for sex selection online in Turkey

Abstract

The Internet, beyond providing opportunities for advertising reproductive services, offers people an anonymous social space to exchange information, support, and personal stories regarding their reproductive goals and to enact reproductive moral reasoning regarding controversial biotechnologies in complex ways. Focusing on the online discussion forum of the Turkish web portal Women's Club, this article examines the moral negotiations of sex selection by women seeking to legitimize or delegitimize it through rhetorical appeal to a mix of science, religion, gender, ignorance, propitiousness, and modernity. By doing so, it will reveal the ways in which women forum members work to craft not only moral selves and technologies but also a shared space for moral reflection. By examining the discursive content of Turkish women's postings concerning sex selection, I argue that online forums offer these women an anonymous moral space to discuss their reproductive goals, although some family secrets do not escape the moral scrutiny of others even within these forums. The heterogeneity and complexity of women's moral engagements with reproductive technologies on the Internet demonstrates that reproductive issues are moral issues directly related to the expectations for women as gendered beings, as individuals, family members, and as citizens, and also serve to reproduce social relations, including patriarchal inequalities.