Conservative or primitive?

By Yusuf Kanli
TDN- Some people keep bringing issues to the agenda of the country that are not at all relevant to today's modern Turkey and the understanding of a majority of the Turkish people. Under the pretext of 'social values,' some people insist on imposing rather primitive forms of behavior on others. Rather than promoting such primitive attitudes, Parliament ought to fight against them

Some people keep bringing issues to the agenda of the country that are not at all relevant to today's modern Turkey and the understanding of the majority of the Turkish people. Under the pretext of "social values," some people insist on imposing rather primitive forms of behavior on others.
It wouldn't be an exaggeration to say that scores of women in Turkey lose their lives every year because "they" refuse to go to hospitals and deliver their babies with the help of male or female doctors, instead preferring to resort to the help of ill-trained midwives.
In some cases it is a lack of financial means that forces these mothers choose the midwives, but more often than not it's because of a primitive male chauvinism disguised by the mask of a "conservative husband" that forces the women to have such a preference -- if they are at all asked to make a choice.
Over 20 years ago, as a young graduate of the faculty of dentistry my wife had opened a clinic in Kirikkale -- not a city at that time but rather a booming town thanks to the military facilities and refinery located there. She was the sole woman dentist in the town, and every day tens of women queued up in front of her clinic, while the male dentists were catering only to men.
Had all her patients paid in cash she would have made a fortune, but instead we put on several kilos each because of payments in the form of sacks of flour, buckets of yogurt, baskets of eggs and such items of rural barter. A few months later, my wife gave up and decided to become an academic.
That is, in rural parts of the country men have been applying all sorts of pressure under every possible pretext to "protect" their "wives," whom they consider nothing but a "sex object" for their sole pleasure, and not only when they give birth. Their protective "shield" stems from their fear that other men would look upon their women solely from the same perspective. Domestic violence, polygamy, "honor" killings and such ills of society are merely the by-products of that primitive, male chauvinist form of behavior.
This male chauvinism has also surfaced in the form of the "adultery controversy" and as the "right of female inmates to undergo medical examinations by female doctors in order to avoid sexual harassment."
All doctors of this country, irrespective of their gender, must bombard Parliament with letters protesting this deplorable insult.
"As conditions allow, female doctors will conduct physical examinations of female suspects under detention. In the event this is not possible, physical examinations of female inmates will be done in the presence of a family member." In view of the secularist-Islamist sensitivities in this country, can anyone imagine such a primitivism being included in the law on trial procedures?
This in no way can be called conservative politics. This is naked primitivism. This is an insult to women and to doctors.
The deputies of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) who proposed the inclusion of such a sentence in the text of the law asserted in remarks to the press that if there was such sensitivity on the issue and if their move -- aimed at "preventing charges of sexual harassment during medical examinations of female inmates" -- would be misunderstood, they would withdraw their proposal.
Even this defense is a deplorable insult. The problem is with the mentality. Turkey doesn't deserve such an ugly mentality. Rather than promoting such primitive attitudes, Parliament ought to fight against them.