Surveillance Paternalism

Data technologies are increasingly deployed worldwide in the systematic collection and analysis of reproductive health information. Nowhere is this more evident than in Turkey, where national concerns over declining birth rates have converged with the global push for health tracking over the last decade. In 2008, the Turkish Ministry of Health launched GEBLİZ (Gebe İzlem Sistemi, or "Pregnancy Monitoring System"), a controversial public health surveillance project aimed at reducing high rates of maternal and infant mortality. Based on extended ethnographic and archival research, Surveillance Paternalism traces how GEBLİZ is imagined, implemented, and experienced by activists, health workers, and patients, situating it within the broader history of reproductive politics in Turkey.

Moving beyond individualized concerns about data privacy, the book reconceptualizes surveillance not as an all-encompassing, totalizing power but as a partial, situated, and stratified mechanism of reproductive governance. By analyzing disruptions to people's (social and biological) reproductive lives that do not make it into the database, such as labor precarity, poverty, domestic abuse, and state violence, the book argues that surveillance often operates not through what is monitored but through what is omitted and rendered invisible. Tracing the social life of data technologies and people's responses to them, the book raises broader questions about the relationship between health data and reproductive justice.