China uses forced sterilization, abortion to limit Muslim population: report

The Chinese government is using widespread and systematic forced birth control as part of a campaign to lower its Muslim population, according to an Associated Press report.

Based on state documents, government statistics, and interviews with dozens of women, the report says that the last four years have seen what experts call “demographic genocide” in the far west region of Xinjiang, which is majority Muslim and is the native home to the Uighurs.

Though China has discontinued its notorious “one child” policy, with some families allowed to have as many as three, AP claims that under President Xi Jinping, the Uighurs have disproportionately received forced abortions, sterilizations, IUD insertions and other punishments that come with having too many kids, compared to the country’s Han majority.

Those assertions are backed up by the numbers. From 2015 to 2018, birth rates in the mostly Uighur regions of Hotan and Kashgar have dropped 60%. In Xinjiang, the birth rate fell 24% in the last year alone, compared to a 4.2% drop nationwide.

“God bequeaths children on you. To prevent people from having children is wrong,” said Gulnar Omirzakh, who was ordered to get an IUD and had to pay a fine for having too many children. “They want to destroy us as a people.”

Experts say that this forced birth control campaign falls under a pattern of mistreatment of the Uighurs at the hands of the Chinese government, with the ultimate goal of assimilation into the mainstream Chinese population. Some have more extreme terms for what’s happening.

“It’s genocide, full stop. It’s not immediate, shocking, mass-killing on the spot type genocide, but it’s slow, painful, creeping genocide,” Joanne Smith Finley of Newcastle University told the AP.

“These are direct means of genetically reducing the Uighur population.”