Stork

Last week, a 20.5-hour meeting was held at the Turkish Grand National Assembly (TBMM) Constitutional Committee. One of the main topics of the meeting was the legislative proposal regarding the automatic change of a woman's surname to her husband's surname upon marriage. As is known, the Constitutional Court (AYM), with its decision dated February 22, 2023, completely annulled the mandatory Article 187 of the Turkish Civil Code, titled "Woman's Surname," which stated, "A woman takes her husband's surname upon marriage. However... she may use her previous surname before her husband's surname by making an application. A woman who previously used two surnames can benefit from this right only once," and decided that the decision would enter into force 9 months after its publication in the Official Gazette on April 28, 2023. In line with the AYM decision, as of January 28, 2024, the imposition of a surname on a woman upon marriage has been removed from our legislation. In fact, this decision by the AYM was not a surprise to legal professionals. It was merely a declaration of the obvious, as a result of decisions in the same direction rendered by the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) and the General Assembly of Civil Chambers of the Court of Cassation.

It is a fiasco in itself that a regulation annulled by the AYM still occupies the agenda while we have dozens of fundamental problems waiting for solutions in the TBMM. When we look at the subject from historical and legal perspectives, we encounter surprising facts. For instance, apart from our country, there is no other Turkic state that imposes a husband's surname on a woman upon marriage. There is no such established practice within the Arab-Islamic tradition either. It does not exist in Arab states such as Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Algeria, or Tunisia. Since the Surname Law came into effect in 1935 and there was no concept of a surname during the Ottoman Empire, such a tradition inherited from the past does not exist. Viewed from this perspective, it turns out that the impositions of surname and registry transfers made to married women are a product of the unique ingenuity of the Turkish male. While each of us is barcoded with a T.R. identity number and all our data has been digitized via e-Devlet, I do not think there is any rational or conscientious reason to keep this imposition on the agenda with various excuses.

We mentioned the legal and historical data regarding people's thoughts/beliefs above. I also want to talk about the facts. The creature named human has, since the beginning of time, found life in the woman's body for 39-40 weeks following the union of woman and man, and ultimately separates from this body to come into the world. During this process, the child is nourished by the woman's body, and its life and development are limited moment by moment to what the woman can offer. In the union of woman and man, the only thing the man gives to the woman is his own chromosomes. Other than involuntarily determining the gender of his child due to the Y chromosome he carries, he has no contribution to the process. He meets his child for the first time 9 months and 10 days later. While a man can produce the sperm necessary for reproduction throughout his life, the eggs in a woman's body never increase after birth; on the contrary, they always decrease. In other words, the time cost of the female body is much higher than that of the male body. Scientific studies show that the child's mitochondrial DNA comes entirely from the woman, and emotional intelligence (EQ) and intelligence quotient (IQ) come largely from the woman. It is frankly sad that we have not yet been able to conclude that the lineage comes from the mother and that the man is merely a tool for reproduction, even though it is established that in our species, which we name with the word "human" in Turkish, women develop behaviors parallel to queen bees and men to worker bees.

In this context, imposing the husband's surname on a woman is, first and foremost, contrary to the process of human creation. If an imposition is to be made under the guise of a family surname, it is necessary to prioritize the lineage and surname of the woman who creates the human. Every human being who comes into the world has been given life by a woman. The created is the work of the creator and belongs to them. In a fair legal and world order, it is impossible for a man to impose his surname on a woman when they marry, and on the child the woman gives birth to as soon as it is born, beyond writing his name in the father's registry for his child. We need to update our country's backward patriarchal structure by protecting the gains of the AYM's annulment decision; that is, we need to remove concepts such as "maiden name" or "pre-marital surname" from our lives from now on.