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AUTUMN APPEAL
Dear SPUC supporter,
Earlier this year, SPUC launched a report into the funding of coercive abortion in China by the UK government which targets the minority Uygur population.
Here I am pictured at the report’s launch at Parliament with pro-life MP Jacob Rees-Mogg.
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SPUC's Director of Public Policy, Michael Robinson, with Alithea Williams, our Public Policy Manager, Jacob Rees-Mogg MP, SPUC CEO, John Deighan and Monika Užkalnytė, our Parliamentary Officer, launching the Complicit Report at Parliament in March
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SPUC is calling on the government to end all funding for abortion programmes in countries where concerns exist about women being coerced into abortion.
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But we are especially concerned with the fate of the Uyghurs.
The Uyghurs are a predominantly Turkic Muslim group.
They speak their own language and see themselves as culturally and ethnically close to Central Asian nations.
About 12 million Uyghurs live in the Xinjiang region of China, which is officially known as the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR).
China’s population control policies make for shocking reading:
- Under its One Child Policy, introduced in 1979, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) openly admits to carrying out 336 million abortions and 196 million sterilisations
- Across the Xinjiang region, birth rates among Uyghurs continue to plummet, falling nearly 24% last year alone – compared to just 4.2% nationwide
- Yet despite all the evidence of the CCP’s flagrant human rights abuses, the UK watchdog that oversees foreign grants calculates that UK aid for China totalled around £82 million in 2019.
But behind every statistic, lies a real baby and mother. This is the harrowing story of one such Uyghur woman and what she was forced to endure:
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Bumeryem Rozi – “I had no choice but to say yes to the abortion.”
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In August 2008, I was pregnant with my 5th child. This was illegal by the state. We were prepared to pay the 10,000 Yuan penalty for that, but the authorities refused our offer.
The authorities said that if you deliver this baby, we will seal your house and you will be taken to a ‘People’s Gathering’ [a euphemism for a detention camp] and we will send your husband to a different ‘People’s Gathering’.
I was planning to run away to somewhere else to give birth to my baby.
My husband said, If you run away, they will come to me and what will happen? My husband agreed to the abortion in order to avoid this. I had no choice but to say yes to the abortion.
The authorities came to my house 3 days before the procedure to tell me they were going to abort my baby.
Four individuals; two from the local Birth Control authority and two from the local police station took me from my house and placed me in a civilian car.
Three other women travelled with me. They took us to Kashgar, where we changed to another car which went to the hospital.
The police followed us in a separate car.
My husband and the husbands of the other women also followed us in another car. The hospital was the Mother and Baby Hospital of Kashgar.
When we arrived in the hospital there were many other Uyghur women from different villages.
All of the patients I saw were Uyghur.
They put the four women I had travelled with and me into four different rooms, at almost the same time. In all rooms, there was one bed inside. It was there the abortion was carried out.
They gave me a tablet. Then 2 hours later they injected my stomach. A further 2 hours later the dead baby came out.
I was not allowed to leave the room until the baby came out.
I passed out from the pain and I stayed there another half an hour after the abortion. I was 5 months pregnant. In other rooms, I saw aborted babies that were a few days short of being born.
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International pro-abortion institutions responsible for driving up abortions at home and abroad
It may come as a surprise to learn that international bodies like the UN have collaborated in China’s coercive abortion policies.
Concerns that the United Nations Population Fund’s (UNFPA) programme in China engaged in or provided funding for abortion or coercive family planning programs have at times resulted in the withholding of U.S. funding from UNFPA.
However, the United Nations' involvement in pushing for universal abortion access is not restricted to developing countries alone.
For decades, the world’s largest and most influential intergovernmental organisation, founded to promote harmony and peace in the world, has been hard at work facilitating “access” to abortion.
A right in international law to abortion “access” is an even more extensive right than a right to abortion per se since it implies that governments are obligated to:
- Train doctors to perform abortions
- Set up abortion facilities
- Pay for abortions on demand for any reason, even up to birth.
CEDAW Report: the UN Trojan Horse that saw abortion imposed on the people of Northern Ireland
A 2018 report by the UN’s Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) was the trigger for the 2019 legislation that massively expanded abortion access in Northern Ireland.
The CEDAW report came with a set of Recommendations for framing abortion provision in the Province. However, the Recommendations extend far beyond simply expanding abortion access:
FIRST: They signpost children at schools to where they can access abortion.
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SPUC recently launched a campaign opposing classroom promotion of abortion in Northern Ireland, including in Catholic schools.
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SECOND: They ban pro-life groups like SPUC from visiting schools and giving the pro-life perspective on abortion.
THIRD: Ban pro-life pavement counselling at clinics, denying women seeking abortions eleventh-hour support and real alternatives to keep their babies.
Constitutionally, abortion is devolved to the Northern Ireland Assembly. As such it is a matter to be decided by Northern Ireland politicians alone – a move that they had repeatedly rejected.
In the end, it was MPs from England, Wales and Scotland voting at Westminster who ultimately sealed the fate of Northern Ireland's babies.
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Abortions in the Province went from 65 in 2019 to 4,136 between March 2020 and October 2022.
Thanks to SPUC donors’ generous financial support, the Society has been able to mount a legal challenge against the rollout of the CEDAW Recommendations at the High Court in Belfast, which is ongoing.
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The Secretary of State for Northern Ireland set a target of at least 6,500 abortions per year, but SPUC’s court case has held up the full rollout of his abortion regime, helping to save a projected 12,000 unborn babies’ lives.
SPUC has a long history of fighting for the rights of unborn children in the international sphere.
The Society was at the forefront of the pro-life battle at the United Nations for more than 20 years from 1994-2016.
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A former SPUC United Nations research officer pictured at the UN headquarters in New York in 2015
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Abortion rights are simply wrong
What begins with a call from our opponents for an inalienable right to choose abortion ends for Uyghur women like Bumeryem Rozi in a state-imposed DUTY to kill their children, having absolutely “no choice” in the matter at all.
In first-world countries, the growing influence of powerful and wealthy international pro-abortion organisations like the UN is entirely subverting the democratic process.
Governments now find themselves obligated to fund and facilitate abortion even when a majority of the voters and legislators are diametrically opposed to it, as is the case in Northern Ireland.
Will you give £10 or £25 or £50 or 100 or £500 or £1,000 or £5,000 or more to support SPUC’s efforts to fight back against the international abortion lobby and its other vital work in the defence of the unborn and their mothers at home and abroad?
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Today is Day 10 of SPUC’s autumn fundraising appeal.
As we approach the appeal’s halfway point, I would like to thank everyone who has donated so far.
A tremendous £33,586.39 has been raised to date.
Our target is £100,000, which we must raise by the month's end. The money will be used to:
- Highlight the plight of the Uyghurs and call for an END to UK aid to China and other countries suspected of abortion coercion
- Oppose Northern Ireland’s CEDAW-inspired abortion framework through the courts
- Support the legal defence of “Lydia”, the woman suing the abortion provider who carried out her late-term abortion that she never wanted
- Implement the Justice for Baby Lily Campaign, a major new parliamentary campaign which aims to END the abortion pills-by-post scheme responsible for record UK abortions and a shocking rise in the number of hospitalisations.
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Thank you for steadfastly standing with unborn babies and their mothers.
Yours in the Defence of Life,
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John Deighan
Chief Executive
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