An MP has urged the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office to call on the Chinese Communist Party to end their population control measures, including forced abortions and sterilisation, of the Uyghur community in China.
Conservative MP Fiona Bruce, in a debate in the House of Commons on international development and gender-based violence drew attention to the “appalling” treatment of the Uyghur community at the hands of the Chinese Government.
Mrs Bruce said: “[The Uyghurs] are violated through forced birth control, pregnancy checks, the mandatory insertion of painful intrauterine devices, forced sterilisation and abortions. We hear that that is happening at scale, to hundreds of thousands of women”.
“These population control measures are backed by mass detention as a punishment for failure to comply. The threat of being sent to prison – to the camps that we hear so much about – hangs over these women”.
A climate of terror
“Simply having too many children is a major reason why people are sent to detention camps”.
“We even hear of female detainees being taken to prison camps and forced to abort their own unborn children. The result of this birth control campaign is a climate of terror”.
The MP went on to point out that in the regions of Hotan and Kashgar, birth rates among the Uyghur have “plunged” by more than 60% between 2015 and 2018.
“Will the [Minister of State (Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office,) James Cleverly], whenever possible, call on the Chinese Communist Party to end these horrific practices, which are part of a state-orchestrated assault on Uyghur women and the wider Uyghur community with the aim of purging them of their identity?”
Forced abortions in China
Forced abortions and sterilisations are a well-documented phenomenon in China. This year a doctor who escaped the regime in China has shared how she participated in at least 500-600 operations on Uyghur women in the country, including forced abortion, forced sterilisation and forced removal of wombs.
Speaking to ITV News, the Uyghur woman also revealed abortions were carried out at full-term and that infanticide – the purposeful causing of a baby’s death – was common practice.
Historically, they are related to China’s infamous one-child policy and have resulted in widespread sex-selective abortions. In such abortions, baby girls are typically aborted precisely because they are girls. The UN estimates that over the last 30 years, 200 million girls have gone ‘missing’ as result of sex-selective abortion, many of them in China and India.
Right To Life UK’s spokesperson, Catherine Robinson, said: “The unethical treatment that the Chinese Communist Party is perpetuating on its Uyghur population is beyond words. Fiona Bruce MP is right to urge the Foreign Office to condemn the CCP’s actions. Forced abortions not only end the life of an unborn child, but are also a gross attack on the dignity of their mothers”.
