Chinese hospitals abort Uighur pregnancies, kill newborns: report

• Hospitals in Xinjiang, China aborted third-trimester Uighur pregnancies and even killed newborn Uighur babies, Radio Free Asia (RFA) reported.
• Since 2016, China has been operating a hardline, the so-called counterterrorism campaign against its Uighur Muslim minority. Finally, 1 million Uighurs were held in camps and brainwashed.
• Uighurs are prevented by law from having more than two children if they live in cities, and three if they live in the countryside.
• Hasiyet Abdulla, a Uighur doctor with 15 years of experience in Xinjiang, told RFA that if women commit crimes that will restrict their babies, they will be killed, both in utero or after birth.
• It is the latest in several reports confirming how China is cutting Uighur birth rates, including forced sterilization and mandatory anti-control measures.
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Hospitals in Xinjiang aborted late-stage pregnancies and killed newborns as part of China’s mission to eradicate Uighur culture, a former doctor from the region told Radio Free Asia.

Since 2016, China has detained at least 1 million Uighurs in hundreds of prison camps, calling it the euphemistic “reeducation center”. In those camps, Uighurs are forced to abandon their heritage and religion.

A large part of this outage consists of limiting the reproductive rights of Uighurs and reducing the birth rate.

In 2017, China passed a law restricting Uighurs, and other ethnic minorities, to three children in rural areas and two in urban areas.

Under China’s unilateral policy, which was abandoned in 2016, Han Chinese citizens – people of the majority ethnic majority group – were encouraged and sometimes forced to take controversy and undergo abortions to keep their birth rates low. But minorities, such as the Uighurs, were always allowed two to three children, according to the Associated Press (AP).

Hasiyet Abdulla, a Uighur doctor who worked in hospitals in Xinjiang for 15 years and now lives in Turkey, told RFA that when a child was expected to be born into a family already living in were the limit, the pregnancy would be terminated.

Terminations occurred when a woman was “eight and nine months pregnant,” she said. Sometimes medical staff would ‘kill the babies themselves after they were born,’ Abdulla added.

“They would not give the baby to the parents – they kill the babies when they are born,” she said.

“It’s a mandate given above, it’s a mandate that is printed and distributed in official documents. Hospitals get fined if they do not comply, so they carry this out, of course,” she told RFA.

The news follows a series of reports proving how China is forcing many Uighur women to sterilize and fit others with intrauterine devices to prevent pregnancy.

And the attempt to limit the numbers of Uighurs born each year seems to be working. The birth rate in Xinjiang fell in 2019 by almost 24%, according to the AP.

Much of what happens in the camps is still a mystery, but former prisoners have said they were subjected to medical experiments, forced to renovate their homes to see their traditional Chinese, and to sing propaganda songs to get food.

China has also been accused of scratching the organs of some Uighurs. Beijing has denied the claim.

Earlier this month, The Globe and Mail published a rare video made in a camp, filmed by a Uighur model who disappeared in January 2020. The video showed the model, Merdan Ghappar, handcuffed to a bed when propaganda blared outside his window. The BBC also reported Ghappar’s testimony.

China has since demanded that officials handcuff Ghappar on his bed because he had “acts of self-harm and excessive acts against the police”, according to the BBC.

The prison camps have drawn condemnation on the world stage, but just as with criticism of their collapse in Hong Kong, China is not showing much interest in changing its ways.

The US said in July 2020 that it had added 11 Chinese companies to an export blacklist because they were accused of using forced labor of Uighur prisoners in Xinjiang.

A report by 180 human rights groups published last month reported that about one in five cotton garments sold worldwide contain cotton or yarn from the region.