Hospitals in Xinjiang, China aborted third-trimester Uighur pregnancies and even killed newborn Uighur children, Radio Free Asia (RFA) reported.
Since 2016, China has operated a hardline, so-called counterterrorism campaign against its Uighur Muslim minority. At last 1 million Uighurs have been detained in camps and brainwashed.
Uighurs are prevented by law from having more than two children if they live in cities, and three if they live in the countryside.
Hasiyet Abdulla, a Uighur doctor with 15 years’ experience in Xinjiang, told RFA that if women breach that limit their babies will be killed, either in utero or post-birth.
Under China’s one-child policy, which was abandoned in 2016, Han Chinese citizens — people of the majority ethnic majority group — were encouraged and sometimes forced to take contraception and undergo abortions to keep their birth rate low. But minorities, such as the Uighurs, were always allowed two to three children, according to the Associated Press (AP).
Hasiyet Abdulla, a Uighur doctor who spent 15 years working in hospitals in Xinjiang, and who now lives in Turkey, told RFA that when a child was expected to be born into a family who were already on the limit, the pregnancy would be terminated.
Terminations happened when woman were as much as “eight and nine months pregnant,” she said. Sometimes medical staff would “even kill the babies after they’d been born,” Abdulla added.