Disgusting news broke yesterday: The Chinese Embassy in the United States proudly announced on Twitter that its sterilization policy for Uighur women in “residential communities” was actually liberating them by protecting them from the horror of being baby-making machines. It was an eerie echo of Barack Obama’s pronouncements about the necessity of early birth control as a way to protect his daughters from the punishment of a baby.

This is a real tweet from the Chinese embassy in the U.S. (As you read it, keep in mind that Twitter bans the United States president from its site, but not the Chinese Communist Party):

Rita Panahi understood what lay behind that tweet:

Once upon a time, even leftist outlets reported on the forced sterilization program of captive Uighur women.

However, in the linked article in the China Daily, which is the official party organ of the Chinese Communist Party, the CCP pushes back against those nasty accusations. It touts, instead, the wonders of its liberating birth control policies vis-à-vis Uighur residents in “residential communities”:

Decreases in the birthrate and natural population growth rate in the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region in 2018 resulted from the eradication of religious extremism, a report released on Thursday said.

The report on population change in Xinjiang published by the Xinjiang Development Research Center said extremism had incited people to resist family planning and its eradication had given Uygur women more autonomy when deciding whether to have children.

The changes were not caused by "forced sterilization" of the Uygur population, as repeatedly claimed by some Western scholars and politicians, it said.

This is Orwellian language. The reason “extremism” has been eradicated, is because China has been systematically assembling Uighurs in concentration camps and using them for slave labor and forced organ donations. You get faint echoes of what really happened in this paragraph:

For a period of time, the penetration of religious extremism made implementing family planning policy in southern Xinjiang, including Kashgar and Hotan prefectures, particularly difficult, the research center's report said. That had led to rapid population growth in those areas as some extremists incited locals to resist family planning policy, resulting in the prevalence of early marriage and bigamy, and frequent unplanned births.

In other words, the CCP’s ethnic and religious enemies were having too many children, so the CCP put a stop to that. Doubt me? How about this:

The Uygur population grew from 10.2 million in 2010 to 12.7 million in 2018, an increase of more than 25 percent, while the population of Han people in the region increased by just 2 percent to 9 million over the same period.

Let me translate again: China’s one-child policy has worked for the preferred Han citizens, but the Uighur’s weren’t getting on board with the program. Now they are, whether they like it or not.

But let’s get back to the wonders of the new Chinese policies. You see, it’s for the women!

In the process of eradicating extremism, the minds of Uygur women were emancipated and gender equality and reproductive health were promoted, making them no long baby-making machines, it said. Women have since been striving to become healthy, confident and independent.

The moment I read those words – how saving women from babies liberates them – I could think of only one thing and that’s Obama insisting that young children need to be taught about birth control:

“I’ve got two daughters, 9 years old and 6 years old.  I am going to teach them first of all about values and morals. But if they make a mistake, I don’t want them punished with a baby.” (Emphasis mine.)

In China, those lucky-ducky Uighur women aren’t going to face that kind of punishment ever again.

IMAGE: Uighur detainees in China. YouTube screengrab.