China is Forcing Hundreds of Thousands of Minority Women to Kill Their Babies in Abortions

International   |   Micaiah Bilger   |   Jun 29, 2020   |   1:30PM   |   Washington, DC

A new report confirms wide-spread forced abortions and sterilizations continue in China, targeting minority mothers and their unborn babies.

For many years, pro-life advocates have been exposing China’s massive human rights abuses through its oppressive population control measures. Under its one child policy, the communist country forced women to abort their unborn babies through all nine months of pregnancy and penalized families with huge fines and jail time if they had a second or third child.

About five years ago, China loosened its population control policies, but pro-life advocates warned that forced abortion practices continue.

This week, reports confirm that these human rights abuses are still happening – and at a larger scale than previously thought.

The Express reports the Uighur, a minority Muslim group in the Xinjiang region, is being targeted for these abuses, according to data and research by the Associated Press.

Hundreds of thousands of Uighur women are being subjected to state pregnancy testing, forcibly sterilized and forced to abort their unborn babies, according to the report.

Additionally, at least 1 million Uighurs have been placed in “re-education” camps since in 2017, PBS News reports. And, according to the AP, one of the main reasons for their detention is having too many children.

The Daily Beast reports: “One woman, After Gulnar Omirzakh, said the government ordered her to have an IUD inserted after her third child. Two years later, officials turned up at her house and told her she had three days to pay a $2,685 fine for having more than two children. She said: ‘God bequeaths children on you. To prevent people from having children is wrong… They want to destroy us as a people.’”

Echoing stories pro-lifers have been sharing for years, the reports told of police raids on families’ homes in search of illegal children, families going into hiding to protect their children, government intimidation and more.

Follow LifeNews on the Parler social media network for the latest pro-life news!

Statistics show huge contrasts in birth rates, birth control and sterilization in regions where the Uighur live, compared to the rest of the country.

As the Express reports:

While the use if IUDs and sterilisation has fallen nationwide, there has been a sharp increase in the region of Xinjiang. … Birth rates across the Uighur regions of Hotan and Kashgar have plummeted by more than 60 percent from 2015.

In the Xinjiang region, birth rates fell to nearly 24 percent last year alone.

Adrian Zenz, a Chinese scholar, said the birth rate drop is unprecedented and claimed it is part of a control campaign.

“This kind of drop is unprecedented… there’s a ruthlessness to it. This is part of a wider control campaign to subjugate the Uighurs.”

Chinese government leaders slammed the report as “fake news,” but the AP’s findings are not new.

Decades ago, Steven W. Mosher, president of the Population Research Institute, was one of the first people to expose the forced abortions and other horrific human rights abuses in China.

He wrote in 2012: “It is well known that those who violate the one-child policy have sometimes been subjected to coerced abortions or, if they have already given birth, have been forced to pay punitive fines and have been sterilized. But it has also recently come to our attention that Chinese villagers who cannot afford to pay these fines have their ‘illegal’ children abducted and sold by Chinese population control officials.”

Even after China loosened its population control measures in 2015, human rights advocates said the abuses continued.

In 2016, Reggie Littlejohn, founder and president of Women’s Rights Without Frontiers, told LifeNews that the new measures did not stop forced abortions and involuntary sterilizations in China. Find a video about it here.

“Unmarried women and third children continue to be forcibly aborted.  Women are still routinely sterilized after their second child,” Littlejohn said.

She said the Chinese army of family planning officials is estimated at 1 million, and their population control tactics are used to quell growing unrest inside China.

“… people should not come away with the false impression that all or even most of China’s brutal ‘abortion police’ are being repurposed as an army of  ‘Chinese Father Christmas.’  This is far from the case,” Littlejohn said. “I do not believe that China will repurpose its family planning army, because the infrastructure of coercion instituted under the One Child Policy can be turned in any direction to crush dissent of any sort.”

A recent BBC report also found that families remain fearful of the population control officials. One family shared how they tried to hide a pregnancy from the government and then suffered the consequences. The husband was kidnapped and beaten and the wife forced to abort their unborn child more than six months into the pregnancy.

“The baby was well-formed,” the grandmother told the BBC. “You could even see his fingernails. He was a bit small, but very well-developed already.”