TIBET, Aug 2 (LSN.ca) - China’s forced abortion, one-child policy has come under fire yet again, this time from Tibetans who are testifying to horrific human rights abuses at the hands of the Chinese. Even the United Nations Foundation (UNF) (Ted Turner’s group) is reporting the news on its wire service, which is drawing information from an August report in Jane magazine. Tibetans are accusing China of intentionally trying to gut their population through a 20 year imposition of their one-child policy. According to the UNF yesterday, “allegations of procedures forced on Tibetan women include infanticide, in which lethal chemicals are injected into a baby’s brain, forced abortion after nine months of pregnancy, abortion via electrical rods inserted through the vagina, rusty IUDs that may bring on tuberculosis and other diseases and IUDs left in the uterus for eight years instead of the recommended three.”
Blake Kerr, the US doctor who reported on the situation in Tibet, said the conditions in Tibetan hospitals he visited were “a hygienic atrocity,” with bloodstained gurneys and the regular use of non-sterilized equipment. “According to the Tibetan Women’s Association, nearly 20 percent of Tibetans may no longer be able to reproduce because of sterilization procedures,” reports the UNF. “One Tibetan woman interviewed by researchers at the Tibetan Administration in Dharamsala, India, said 70 percent of women over age 18 in a her village, including herself, were sterilized. In one district, 308 women were reportedly sterilized in 22 days.”
This is not the first time such allegations have come to light. Just last year “the US State Department’s 1999 report on China claims that forced sterilization and abortion are common in Tibet,” notes UNF. But predictably China continues to deny practicing forced sterilization or abortion and has claimed that policies are implemented “in full consideration of the wishes of the Tibetan people.”