WASHINGTON: A US official voiced disgust Friday after China’s embassy took to social media to laud how women of the mostly Muslim Uighur community were no longer “baby-making machines.”
“Appalled and disgusted at lies” of the Chinese embassy, tweeted Sam Brownback, the US envoy on international religious freedom.
“Coercive population control is not reproductive health care. (Uighur) women deserve to enjoy their religious freedom and unalienable rights with dignity to make their own choices.”
China’s embassy on Thursday promoted a study in state-run media that said that the birth rate declined in 2018 among Uighur women as they increasingly accepted contraceptive measures due to the “eradication of religious extremism.”
“The minds of (Uighur) women in Xinjiang were emancipated and gender equality and reproductive health were promoted, making them no longer baby-making machines,” the embassy tweeted from the study.
Rights groups say more than one million Uighurs and other mostly Muslim people in China’s northwestern region of Xinjiang have been incarcerated in camps in a bid to root out Islamic customs and forcibly integrate minorities.
China insists it is offering vocational training to reduce the allure of extremism in the wake of deadly attacks.
A study by German researcher Adrian Zenz last year found that China had forcibly sterilized large numbers of Uighur women and pressured them to abort pregnancies that exceeded birth quotas, an assertion denied by Beijing.
US lawmakers have pointed to population control as they push for a declaration that China’s policies meet the definition of genocide.
The Council on American-Islamic Relations, an advocacy group, urged Twitter to remove the tweet by the embassy, which it said used the platform “to celebrate crimes against humanity.”
US voices disgust at China boast of Uighur population control
https://arab.news/gnm2t
US voices disgust at China boast of Uighur population control
- US envoy on international religious freedom Sam Brownback: Coercive population control is not reproductive health care
- A study by German researcher Adrian Zenz last year found that China had forcibly sterilized large numbers of Uighur women
Two family members of Mexico’s education secretary killed in shooting
MEXICO CITY: Authorities in the western Mexican state of Colima said they killed three people suspected in the shooting deaths of two family members of Mexico’s secretary of education on Saturday.
Colima, located on Mexico’s Pacific coast, is one of the country’s most violent states. It recorded the highest homicide rate in Mexico in 2023 and 2024, according to the US State Department.
The local prosecutor’s office said officers killed three suspects in the 4:30 am (1030 GMT) shooting of two women, whom Mexico’s Secretary of Public Education Mario Delgado later identified as his aunt and cousin.
They did not identify a motive in the shooting or say whether they were searching for other suspects.
“Deep shock, outrage, and sorrow over the events that occurred this morning in Colima, where my aunt Eugenia Delgado and my cousin Sheila were brutally murdered in their home,” Delgado wrote on X on Saturday.
Officials tracked the suspects’ vehicle to a Colima home on Saturday afternoon and killed three people in a gunfight, according to the prosecutor’s office.
Investigators found weapons and clothing in the suspects’ home linked to the double shooting.
Delgado was appointed education secretary by President Claudia Sheinbaum in 2024. He previously served as national president of the ruling Morena party.
