China has allegedly been forcing birth control or sterilization to women in Xinjiang to curb the population growth of Muslim Uighurs, a new research suggests.
The report by Adrian Zenz, a Chinese scholar, has urged international reports and calls for the United Nations to look into the case and investigate, as reported by BBC.
Chinese officials, however, have denied the reports calling them baseless and without supportive evidence.
The claims come amid widespread criticism of the Asian nation for keeping Uighurs inside detention camps.
Controlling birth rates
There are an estimated one million Uighur citizens and other Muslim-majority groups in China who are placed in what the country considers as "re-education" camps.
Previously, China had denied that the camps existed before defending their necessity as a countermeasure against terrorists amid violence from separatists in the region of Xinjiang.
Mike Pompeo, the United States secretary of state, demanded China shut down the operations and release the citizens immediately.
The secretary wrote in a statement that every nation around the world should work together to force China to abuse that dehumanizes its citizens.
The controversial nation has been facing global criticism over how it treats the Uighur people for the past few years.
BBC previously conducted an investigation in 2019 that claimed children residing in Xinjiang were systematically separated from their parents in an attempt to divide them from their Muslim society.
According to AP News, even though several women have openly expressed their thoughts of forced birth control, the method is still widely used and much more strategic than previously thought.
An investigation by AP News on government statistics, state documents, and verbal communication with 30 ex-detainees of the camps, their family members, and a former instructor for the camps revealed the findings.
In the last four years, the campaign inside Xinjiang is seen leading up to what experts call a type of demographical genocide of the Uighur.
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Regular and continuous checks
Allegedly, China conducts regular pregnancy checks to minority women and forces them to use intrauterine devices, sterilization, and abortion which has affected hundreds of thousands of citizens, as showed in data and interviews.
The use of IUDs and sterilization in the country had fallen in recent years but in Xinjiang have been rising sharply.
The measures used to control the growth of the population are supported by mass detention. They are considered as both a threat and a punishment for failure to follow the exaggerated rules.
People are sent to detention camps, mainly due to having too many children where parents who have three or more children are stripped away from their loved ones unless they can pay massive fines. Police officers raid the homes of these families, striking fear in the parents as the officials search the area for children who may have been hidden.
As seen in interviews one after another, the result of the forced birth control campaign shows a season of terror and fear of having children. In the regions of Hotan and Kashgar where there are mostly Uighur, birth rates dropped by more than 60% between 2015 and 2018, which is the latest available data from government statistics.
Across the region of Xinjiang, on the other hand, birth rates continue to drop, plummeting to nearly 24% in just the last year, while the entire nation sits at a drop of 4.2%, as reported by the Time.
The Chinese government has allocated hundreds of millions of dollars to regulating birth control in the Xinjiang region. It has transformed the area from one of the nation's fastest-growing areas into one of the slowest in a few short years, as shown in Zenz' publication.
Zenz noted the horrifying state that the drop in birth rate suggests, saying that the program is only a small part of a grander control campaign that aims to control the Uighurs.
