A doctor at a private hospital in Sakarya, near Istanbul, lost his job this year after health officials found he had performed too many Caesarean sections.
His case is one of more than 100 now under scrutiny as Turkey’s health ministry moves to punish obstetrician-gynaecologists for what it considers an overuse of surgical deliveries, according to the newspaper BirGün. The doctors involved have been fined, suspended from duty, or ordered into mandatory antenatal training.
The numbers behind the crackdown are stark. Data from 2023 shows Turkey has the highest C-section rate among all 38 countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, with about 615 such procedures for every 1,000 live births. Nationally, the rate has climbed past 60 percent.
The policy has its roots in demographics, not just medicine. Last year, the government of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan launched a campaign to reverse Turkey’s falling birth rate, part of a wider “Decade of the Family” initiative. Encouraging natural childbirth became one strand of that effort. In April 2025, authorities banned private hospitals from carrying out elective C-sections unless there was a clear medical reason.
Doctors say the pressures behind the C-section trend are practical, not personal. A Caesarean typically takes about 30 minutes, compared with up to 12 hours for a vaginal birth. Physicians told AFP the procedure also lowers the risk of legal trouble if complications occur during labour, offering more certainty to both doctor and patient.
That practicality is now colliding with government policy, and doctors’ groups say individual physicians are being blamed for a problem that runs deeper. The Antalya Chamber of Physicians said on its website that obstetricians have been warned, investigated, and in some cases suspended from practising over their C-section numbers.
Dr Ayşe Gültekingil, a senior official at the Turkish Medical Association, pushed back against the fines in comments to BirGün. “Turkey’s caesarean birth rate exceeds 60 per cent,” she said, before pointing to what she called wider faults in the health system rather than the choices of individual doctors.
For now, doctors like the one dismissed in Sakarya are now facing the consequences of this policy shift.
