By Ariel Lin
Impunity Watch Reporter, Asia
BEIJING, China – Arzigul Tursun, a Uyghyr woman who is six months pregnant with her third child, is forced to have abortion in China, according to human rights groups. She fled from a local hospital to avoid a forced abortion. But she has been found by police and taken under guard to a larger hospital, where she was scheduled to undergo an abortion against her will, according to her husband, Nurmemet Tohtasin. “The police found my wife,” he said in a telephone interview from the Women and Children’s Welfare Hospital in Ili prefecture. He added, “My wife’s father was already at the hospital. They will probably do the abortion today.”
The village chief and party secretary had forced Nurmemet Tohtasin to find his wife after she escaped from the local hospital. Nurmemet took officials to two of Tursun’s relatives’ homes and to her parents’ home. “They said if we don’t find Arzigul, they would take our house and our farmland,” he said. The local Party secretary, Nurali, and the Dadamtu township mayor, Juret, declined to comment. The case of Arzigul Tursun is raising international attention because she is six months pregnant and an abortion could threaten her health.
According to China’s official news agency, Xinhua, China maintains a one-child-per-family rule on majority Han Chinese, with more flexible rules for ethnic minorities, to contain its massive population of 1.3 billion citizens. According to the One-Child policy, Uyghurs in the countryside are permitted three children while city-dwellers may have two. Under “special circumstances,” rural families are permitted one more child, although what constitutes special circumstances was unclear. Besides abortion, the government also uses financial incentives and disincentives to keep the birthrate low. Couples can also pay steep fines to have more children, although the fines are well beyond most people’s means.
U.S. Rep. Christopher Smith, a New Jersey Republican, wrote China’s ambassador to Washington, Zhou Wenzhong, to demand that “the nightmare of a forced abortion” not be carried out.
For more information, please see:
ABC News – Outrage Over Forced Abortion Case – 17 November 2008
LifeNews – China Officials Trying to Force Woman Six-Months Pregnant to Have Abortion – 14 November 2008
Radio Free Asia – Uyghur Woman Found, Facing Abortion – 17 November 2008
大纪元 – 新疆维族妇女怀孕6月被迫人工流产 – 11月15日2008
