1 October 2020updated 03 Aug 2021 8:06am

Forced abortion and secret sterilisation: how China has abused Uighur women for decades

Women from China's Uighur minority reveal how the country's family planning policies, which have long controlled women’s bodies, have been weaponised against them.

By Ellen Halliday

KASHGAR, CHINA - SEPTEMBER 21: Woman and her child, Old town of Kashgar, Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, China on September 21, 2012 in Kashgar, China. (Photo by Eric Lafforgue/Art in All of Us/Corbis via Getty Images)

Reyhan was a dancer, three years married and with a toddler in tow when doctors sterilised her without consent. Under the cover of a surgical abortion – the second that her boss and China’s family planning laws demanded – medics secretly sewed up part of her uterus in 2006.

For six years, Reyhan, a Uighur, could not explain why a sneeze sent pain ripping through her abdomen. In 2011, she fled growing state-directed repression in her native Xinjiang, the region in northwest China which Uighurs call East Turkestan, and settled the following year in Belgium.