Nationalist leader: Turkish gov’t approach to women blind, castrated

ANKARA

AA Photo

Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) leader Devlet Bahçeli has chastised the conservative government’s approach to women, which he said was limiting women’s life space to maternity and looking after children.

“The prime minister [Ahmet Davutoğlu] says they have accomplished miraculous progress on the employment issue. He cites women’s participation in labor as a reason for the irrepressible increase in the unemployment ratio,” Bahçeli said.

“When our women - the sole career of whom should be motherhood according to the unhealthy minister of the AKP [the Justice and Development Party] - want to work, unemployment naturally increases. This is what the prime minister means,” Bahçeli said on Jan. 13, addressing the MHP’s weekly parliamentary meeting.

“Accepting a blind and castrated approach that associates women only with giving birth and raising children is impossible,” Bahçeli said.

While visiting the first baby born in 2015 early on Jan. 1, Health Minister Mehmet Müezzinoğlu caused a stir by saying that mothers should not put any career before motherhood.

Only a week later, Davutoğlu unveiled his government’s new incentive program to encourage working women to have more children in a bid to avoid the decline of the Turkish population.

“Apparently, the reason for unemployment has been discovered and it has been invoiced to ladies,” Bahçeli said.

“This indecent and inconsistent statement is ungrateful and disrespectful to the honor of womanhood and the right of being a woman,” he added.