International Women's Day was a somber one for the millions of women who are continued to be abused by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). While many women all around the world celebrated and honored strong, influential women in their respective fields, many are still being held captive or abused, specifically in China's Xinjiang Province, where a network of Uyghur detention camps operate.
Women's Rights Without Frontiers president and founder Reggie Littlejohn took the opportunity to shed light on China's abuse against women, with horrifying stories that continue to take place today.
"How can the so-called first world celebrate the global triumph of women's rights when the CCP continues its war on women with no repercussions?" Littlejohn asked when talking about China's abuse against women with Breitbart News.
She wrote in an editorial for Women's Rights Without Borders, "The women's movement can claim no real victory so long as this scourge against women continues to blight the face of the earth."
The human rights champion implored others to pay attention to China's abuse against women, saying, "Chinese women cannot stand up against forced abortion without risking detention, for themselves and for their families."
China's abuse against women includes the implementation of the Two Child Policy, which forces women to abort unwanted children. According to BMJ, it was implemented in 2015 "to reverse the nation's stagnant population growth, ageing population, and shrinking workforce." However, its repercussions on women were severe. In 2020, Radio Free Asia reported that there were about 8 million "extra" pregnancies, or aborted children in China annually.
In the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) alone, China's abuse against women include forced abortions that are performed on Uyghur women since at least 2005. Other abuse against women included the birth control procedures such as forced implantation of intrauterine devices (IUDs) and tubal ligation surgeries.
Women also had to adhere to strict rules about having children. The report revealed that Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities in rural areas can only have up to three children, while those in urban areas can have up to two. There also must be at least three years in between the children's ages, or else the women will face forced abortions even if they carried the child to full term.
Hasiyet Abdulla, who worked in several XUAR hospitals over 15 years, told RFA last year that most hospitals had family-planning units that carried out the "order." This includes eliminating children who were born outside of the family-planning limits.
She said, "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."
Littlefield also spent International Women's Day by raising awareness of China's abuse against women, specifically gendercide, the "sex selective abortion of baby girls [which] has been practiced for generations" in the communist country.
The human rights champion said, "I find it impossible to celebrate any advancement of women's rights anywhere on earth when one out of five women in the world is subject to a regime that will strap them down to tables, thrust its hands into their wombs and rip their little ones out, as these women scream and plead for the lives of babies they desperately want."
