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Forced abortion and infanticide are being used to carry out China’s family planning policies, according to a former hospital worker in China’s Xinjiang province.
Hospitals regularly force late-term abortions on Uyghur women and kill newborn Uyghur babies, says Hasiyet Abdulla, who presently lives in Turkey.
Abdulla is one of many Uyghurs who have fled to Turkey.
She says hospital maternity wards in Xinjiang strictly enforce family planning laws, including limiting Uyghurs (an ethnic minority group in China), to three children in rural areas or two in urban regions.
Uyghur women must also wait a certain number of years between births.
“The regulations were so strict: there had to be three or four years between children. There were babies born at nine months who we killed after inducing labour. They did that in the maternity wards, because those were the orders,” Abdulla says.
She says in many cases, babies born alive were removed from their parents, killed and then disposed of.
This practice stems from “an order that’s been given from above,” says Abdulla.
Hospitals found to have been in violation of these policies are subjected to fines or other punishments.
The claims of Uyghurs’ late-term abortions and infanticide follow recent revelations that Chinese authorities have been forcibly sterilising ethnic minorities.
A report on 29 June from Associated Press says women are imprisoned for the crime of having too many children and women held in internment camps are frequently checked for pregnancy.
In some cases, women are forcibly implanted with an intrauterine device to prevent future pregnancies.
“It’s not an immediate, shocking, mass-killing-on-the-spot-type genocide, but it’s a slow, painful, creeping genocide,” Dr. Joanne Smith Finley, a senior lecturer in Chinese studies at Newcastle University in the United Kingdom, says.
She says the programme is a “direct means of genetically reducing the Uyghur population.”
The birth rate in the province has dropped considerably since the implementation of forced abortion and infanticide and other family-planning practices.
Between one- and 1.8-million Uyghurs are estimated to be in detention camps set up by Chinese authorities, for “re-education” purposes.
Survivors report indoctrination, beatings, forced labour and torture in the camps.
Wives of Uyghur men detained in the “re-education” camps have reported being forced to marry Han Chinese men. Hans are the majority ethnic group in China.
The U.S. government has sanctioned Chinese officials who are involved with the oppression of the Uyghur population.
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