Forced Birth Control, Sterilization and Abortions Used to Target Minority Population in China

In a startling new report, The Associated Press details how the Chinese Communist government is also forcing women of the Uighur minority to undergo birth control procedures, like an IUD and pregnancy preventing shots, abortions and sterilization.

China remains the world’s most populous country with more than 1.4 billion people, but not all groups in the country are treated equally. In a growing disparity, the Uighurs of Xinjiang Province, which is an ethnic minority group in northwest China, have been the growing targets of an assimilation campaign that increasingly looks like genocide.

Uighur is a Muslim minority population in China and speak a language similar to Turkish. As a group, they are most closely associated ethnically and culturally with the central Asian nations that surround their region, which includes Afghanistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Pakistan, Russia, Mongolia and India.

For many years, Chinese policy had treated this minority group better than the Han, the major ethnic group in the country. For example, the Uighur were never subjected to the China’s brutal one child policy, which saw the government force women to have abortions. But that’s now changing.

In 2014, reports first started to emerge about China’s own terror problem from the Xinjiang region of China. One of the most broadly reported attacks occurred at a train station in southwest China where 29 were killed and more than 100 injured in a knife attack. The state-controlled media reported that Uighur separatists were to blame.

At the time China’s President Xi Jinping declared that the attackers would be punished and the authorities would “crack down on violent terrorist activities in all forms, safeguard social stability and guarantee the safety of people’s lives and property.”

In the preceding years, China has built massive internment camps to imprison and “reeducate” the Uighur and other minorities, which was initially reported by the BBC in 2018 with the detentions starting sometime in 2016.

China says that these camps are “voluntary” and offer the Uighur people the opportunity for education and training. But “voluntary” camps usually don’t include prison barricades, barbed wire fencing, 24-hour a day monitoring and guard towers.

According to reports, about one million people are currently incarcerated in the camps, with a memo stating that the camps should “never allow escapes,” “increase discipline and punishment of behavioral violations,” “promote repentance and confession,” “make remedial Mandarin studies the top priority,” “encourage students to truly transform” and “ensure full video surveillance coverage of dormitories and classrooms free of blind spots.”

In addition, it has now come to light that the Chinese government is forcing Uighur women to undergo forced birth control, whether by injection, pills or an IUD, forced abortions and sterilization. It’s both a method of controlling and terrorizing the population, and a sign that this effort to “control” and “reeducate” the Uighur population is increasingly becoming more genocidal in nature.

As The Associated Press reports, detainees would be forced around the flag pole for assemblies and say things like, “If we have too many children, we’re religious extremists. That means we have to go to the training center.”

This lesson was hammered home by arresting or detaining women and men for having too many children and forcing women to get invasive IUDs, which is a T-shaped plastic frame that’s placed in the uterus and releases the hormone progestin. This IUD is “designed to be irremovable without special instruments.” It’s unclear if the device is even safe.

One woman, who received the device, eventually fled to Kazakhstan with her husband and children after he was released from a detention center. The IUD has now “sunk into her flesh” and is causing piercing back pain and inflammation.

Sterilization has also jumped severely in the region, while the practice has plummeted in the rest of the country. According to reports, sterilization jumped seven-fold during 2016-2018 to 60,000, and many of those sterilized were women of childbearing age.

Zumret Dawut told The Associated Press that about 200 Uighur women with two or more children were rounded up in one compound and forcibly sterilized, including herself.

“I was so angry,” Dawut said. “I wanted another son.”

Perhaps most disturbing are the forced abortions that usually occur after routine gynecological exams. Some women seek out abortions before being forced by the state to endure such invasive exams to avoid potential damage to their reproductive organs. Sometimes, babies are even taken from their mothers after birth without any explanation about where the child was taken.

In a statement to The Daily Citizen, Department of State Spokesperson Morgan Ortagus said, “These latest revelations are sadly consistent with decades of Chinese Communist Party (CCP) practices that demonstrate an utter disregard for the sanctity of human life and basic human dignity. We call on the CCP to immediately end these horrific practices and ask all nations to join the United States in demanding an end to these dehumanizing abuses.” 

Based on all the reports, it appears like the Communist Chinese government is slipping ever closer to genocide. As officially defined in 1948, in addition to killing a specific population, genocide is described as “causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group,” “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part,” “imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group” and “forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”

The United States remains deeply concerned about this issue, with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo issuing a statement saying, “The world received disturbing reports today that the Chinese Communist Party is using forced sterilization, forced abortion, and coercive family planning against Uyghurs and other minorities in Xinjiang, as part of a continuing campaign of repression. German researcher Adrian Zenz’s shocking revelations are sadly consistent with decades of CCP practices that demonstrate an utter disregard for the sanctity of human life and basic human dignity. We call on the Chinese Communist Party to immediately end these horrific practices and ask all nations to join the United States in demanding an end to these dehumanizing abuses.”

For Christians, this entire situation should be incredibly troubling and something that The Daily Citizen will continue to monitor.

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