On Monday, a doctor who worked in the region of Xinjiang told reporters that Chinese hospitals have been conducting abortions of late-stage pregnancies and have killed newborns as part of the country's efforts to cull the Uighur community.
Hospital killings
China has placed more than one million Uighur individuals in several hundreds of prison camps since 2016. The Chinese government has since labeled the camps as "re-education centers" where it says ethnic minorities are told to leave behind their tradition and cultures.
According to Business Insider, a significant part of the repression involves reducing and limiting the population of the ethnic minority by attacking their reproductive rights.
Beijing passed a law in 2017 that limited Uigurs and other ethnic minorities to have a maximum of three children if they lived in rural areas or a maximum of two children if they reside in urban areas.
Under the one-child policy that China abolished in 2016, the majority ethnic group, Han Chinese citizens, were urged to take contraception and be subject to abortions to reduce birth rates. At that time, ethnic minorities were limited to have either two or three children depending on where they lived.
An Uighur doctor who had been working in Xinjiang hospitals for 15 years, Hasiyet Abdulla, told reporters that when a mother who already has two or three children is expecting another child to be born has given birth in the last three years, authorities will move to terminate the pregnancy even if the child was eight or nine months old inside its mother.
Abdulla revealed that hospital staff would sometimes resort to killing newborn babies to reduce their population. The doctor said that medical staff were ordered by higher management to conduct the horrifying activities, as reported by the Catholic News Agency.
The act of forcing abortions on late-stage pregnancies come after Chinese authorities have been accused of sterilizing ethnic minorities against their will. A June 29 report explained how women were arrested and locked up for having too many children.
Re-education camps
Previous reports also state how Uighur women who were placed in internment camps were checked for pregnancy frequently. Some females were also implanted with intrauterine devices that prevent individuals from getting pregnant in the future.
Currently, there are around one to 1.8 million Uighurs that have been kept in over 1,300 internment camps in the region of Xinjiang. Survivors who have managed to speak of their experiences detail their horrific time where Chinese authorities conducted indoctrination and beatings as well as forced labor and torture.
Initially, Chinese officials denied the existence of the internment camps but were forced to admit otherwise in 2018.
A senior lecturer in Chinese Studies, Dr Joanne Smith Finley of Newcastle University said that the campaign was a type of genocide that took its time to slowly and painfully kill of newborns in reducing their population.
The Xinjiang province has recorded a sharp decline in the birth rate since the implementation of the horrific abortions and killings in what officials call family-planning practices.
