How is the family saved? How can a falling population be increased?

One of the greatest advantages of Turkey within the Europe it is trying to join is its young population. True, this population is also one of the most important reasons Europe does not want Turkey. Because with this population Turkey also carries the potential to have greater weight within Europe in the future. Of course, this is a potential that can hold only if this young population stays young forever, or maintains the same proportions in the medium and long term. Yet there is a fact that everyone has perhaps been aware of for 20 years. Turkey is advancing rapidly in a process of ageing. At such a speed that, after a while, there even arises the possibility that Turkey will have no serious difference left from European countries.

The latest statistics published by the Turkish Statistical Institute show that we have reached the village in sight, so to speak, in this matter that has been visible for years. Our rate of population growth has fallen to 1.51 percent. Only 22 years ago, in 2001, this rate was 2.38. That is, within a short span of 22 years our rate of population growth has recorded a fall at a speed that can be called tragic.

This is truly a great danger, and moreover it was a danger that our esteemed President in particular was aware of and tried to warn everyone about. That is why on every occasion he stated that every couple should have at least three children. His emphasis on this subject in the speeches he made at the wedding ceremonies he attended, to young couples getting married, before handing over their marriage certificates, had become virtually the indispensable ritual of every wedding.

After the latest cabinet meeting a few days ago, Erdoğan touched once more on this dangerous course and said: "The population is below the replacement threshold of 2.1. This is an existential disaster, a threat for Turkey. The current situation has gone beyond what is tolerable for our country."

Of course, Erdoğan also recounted the reminders he has been making on this matter for years, and the measures taken in this regard, for strengthening family life, by all the governments he has headed. Because of his emphasis on this matter he received much criticism from so-called women's rights organisations or from the opposition. Especially for the left and feminist opposition, these emphases of Erdoğan were nothing more than a repetition of conservative politics that ignores women or places the burden on their shoulders.

Yet the matter no longer has anything to do with conservatism. The matter has become a thoroughly human and social problem. Today it has become a matter that Germany, Britain and the Netherlands, which are not at all conservative, feel the seriousness of and are looking for ways to take measures against. Even in communist China, the state-supervised population control that was practised for years has been abandoned. A society's inability to renew itself will not give women any right or freedom. On the contrary, the whole of society, and women first of all, will be affected by it.

Erdoğan's emphases on this matter from the beginning were very important and very useful. Perhaps if he had not made these emphases, would this rate of decline have been even greater? For example, would it have fallen not from 2.38 percent to 1.51 percent but to 1.2 percent? We cannot know this for now, but the encouragement Erdoğan has given to having at least 3 children has had at least the following social effect:

There was a time when we were in such a process that people had become ashamed to say they had 2 or more children. A woman-family ideology had become hegemonic in which women in this situation in particular could be accused by other women of ignorance, of being peasants or of lack of awareness. I knew

an academic with 4 children. In every setting where the number of children was asked, she would blush and fluster, trying to explain that this number had come upon her by accident. After this campaign of Erdoğan's, that academic had an account of having had her 5th child this time not by accident but knowingly and willingly. Erdoğan achieved at least this with this campaign.

However, sociological processes can undoubtedly be neither stopped nor advanced by contenting oneself with campaigns of this kind. President Erdoğan also touches on some deviant ideologies to which the family structure has been exposed in this fall in the rate of population growth, and perhaps attributes it to them as a cause to a large extent.

But here it is worth turning to the needle, not only the sack. We were all proud of the revolutionary steps the AK Party took toward Turkey's development compared with past governments. Raising education to 12 years, establishing a university in every province and raising the number of university students to nearly ten percent of the population, encouraging women's entry into working life and taking facilitating steps, and so on. All of these are good and fine things, but these development policies also have a heavy price when their sociological effects are not calculated and measures taken.

We have the problem that higher education, which could once be regarded as a scarce resource, has become excessively widespread today. We need to see that the 12-year compulsory education is the greatest source of concession on quality. There also arises the situation of keeping a large number of young people, who could normally have entered life straight away by working in industry or agriculture, and perhaps thereby married early and had children, idling in school corridors for years amid professional expectations that are unnecessary and that can never satisfy them.

Not being able to marry without finishing university education, without finding a proper job, and in the job found without finding a spouse suited to one's educational and life expectations produces a general typology in which the age of marriage is postponed to nearly the forties for men and 35 for women. On top of this must be added that, since individualist personalities well settled in bachelorhood up to that age cannot easily keep marriages going, divorce rates have now become typical. Under these conditions, even that our birth rate has held at this level is something to be thankful for.

Unfortunately, there is a bitter truth known to population planning practice: population habits do not change easily. Once acquired, it is very difficult to put forward a reverse policy and to run the process in reverse, though of course not impossible. For this, the matter must again be defined as an area where strategic policies need to be put forward. It is a subject that must be taken seriously and that requires the employment of more sociologists and, of course, first of all the employment of a sociological perspective. One can begin by asking how many sociologists are employed in the Ministry of Family or in family policies.

Of course, without forgetting that among sociologists too there is a widespread family and woman paradigm that has them embrace the situation we have arrived at as an ideal one.