WASHINGTON: Hospitals in Xinjiang have been forced to abort and kill babies born in excess of family planning limits, Radio Free Asia reported citing a Uyghur obstetrician who worked in multiple hospitals in China's northwest province.
Hasiyet Abdulla, who currently lives in Turkey says that Xinjiang's hospital maternity wards implemented family-planning policies that restrict Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities to three children in rural areas and two in urban centres.
Enforcement of restrictions requiring women to have a gap of at least three years between pregnancies included killing newborns who had been born after being carried to full term, says the doctor.
Abdulla's revelation comes after a June 29 report about a dramatic increase in recent years in the number of forced sterilizations and abortions targeting Uyghurs in the region. The author, German researcher Adrian Zenz, said may amount to a government-led campaign of genocide under United Nations definitions.
When Zenz's study on forced birth control came out in June, official media had vilified him and said Beijing is "considering suing" him for libel, while the foreign ministry denounced him. According to Hasiyet Abdulla, "Every hospital had a family-planning unit that was responsible for implementation--who had how many kids when they'd given birth to them--they tracked all of this."
"The regulations were so strict: there had to be three or four years between children. There were babies born at nine months who we killed after inducing labor. They did that in the maternity wards, because those were the orders," she said.
Abdulla told RFA that hospital family-planning units carried out the operations, including for women who were "eight and nine months pregnant," adding that in some cases, medical staff would "even kill the babies after they'd been born".
For babies who had been born at the hospital outside of family-planning limits, she said, "They would kill them and dispose of the body. They wouldn't give the baby to the parents--they kill the babies when they're born. "It's an order that's been given from above, it's an order that's been printed and distributed in official documents. Hospitals get fined if they don't comply, so of course they carry this out."
The Uyghurs, a Turkic-speaking minority from Central Asia, are a distinct ethnic group from Han Chinese, with Urumqi being closer to Kabul than Beijing. In 2009, the most infamous riots broke out in the streets of Urumqi, Xinjiang which pitted Uyghur Muslims against Han Chinese.
The CCP government has turned the entire region into a highly controlled, open-air prison after the Urumqi riots in 2009. The CCP has turned the region into a "brutal totalitarian police state" and everything unique about Uyghurs is "systematically targeted".
There have been growing calls for action against the Chinese officials involved in human rights violations in Xinjiang. The US had recently imposed sanctions and visa restrictions against senior officials over human rights violations in Xinjiang.