BEIJING: Hospitals in China’s Xinjiang province frequently commit forced late-term abortions on Uyghur women and killed newborn Uyghur babies to enforce China’s family planning policies.
Hasiyet Abdulla, a Uighur obstetrician told Radio Free Asia that maternity wards implemented strict family-planning policies intended to restrict Uighurs and other ethnic minorities to three children, Christian Post reported.
Speaking to Radio Free Asia, Abdulla described the conditions in hospitals in Xinjiang. Many Uyghurs, an ethnic minority group in China, have fled to Turkey.
“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 labor. They did that in the maternity wards, because those were the orders,” said Abdulla.
Saying that babies who had been born at the hospital outside of family-planning limits weren’t safe either, she added that doctors would “kill them and dispose of the body.”
“They wouldn’t give the baby to the parents — they kill the babies when they’re born,” she said.
Previous reports have revealed how the Communist Chinese Party has forcibly sterilized, aborted, and take other measures to reduce the birthrates in Xinjiang, the report added.
A recent study documented how CCP officials placed fines on Uighur women who had three or more children and forced women to undergo mandatory pregnancy tests, implantation of IUDs, or sterilization surgery.
In Guma County (Pishan) and Hotan city, doctors performed sterilizations 143 times the national average, according to Zenz.
Before a “dramatic spike” of sterilizations in 2016 that has continued into the present, Uighur birthrates were typically higher than the national average and sterilizations much lower.
The RFA report comes as China has faced increasing international criticism over its treatment of Uighurs and other minorities in Western China.
Estimates suggest that over 1 million to as many as 3 million Uighur Muslims and other minority groups in Western China have been subject to internment camps in Xinjiang.
A recent report documented how the religious minority has been subject to massacres, mass internment camps, torture, organ harvesting, and disappearances in addition to forced birth control and sterilization.
The report also highlights the forcible transfer of children from their families to Chinese state orphanages or boarding homes.
In June, the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom argued that the forced sterilization of Uighur Muslims is “evidence of genocide.”
(With inputs from Radio Free Asia and Christian Post)
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