Forced abortion is a form of reproductive coercion that refers to the act of compelling a woman to undergo termination of a pregnancy against her will or without explicit consent.
[3] These accounts have been categorized as a part of Nazi Germany's "systematic program of genocide, aimed at the destruction of foreign nations and ethnic groups".
[3] Those guilty of encouraging or enforcing abortion during the Holocaust were sentenced to a minimum of 25 years imprisonment due to their practice being considered a "inhumane act of extermination".
[6] On September 29, 1997, a bill was introduced in the United States Congress titled Forced Abortion Condemnation Act, that sought to "condemn those officials of the Chinese Communist Party, the government of the People's Republic of China and other persons who are involved in the enforcement of forced abortions by preventing such persons from entering or remaining in the United States".
[9] On July 5, the European Parliament passed a resolution saying it "strongly condemns" both Feng's case specifically and forced abortions in general "especially in the context of the one-child policy".
[6][12] After the shift to a two-child policy in January 2016, the practice was reported in 2020 to still occur through persecution of the Uyghur minority in Xinjiang leading to the US government imposing sanctions on officials in response.
The decision was criticized by the Catholic Church, the Disability Rights Commission, and numerous anti-abortion activist groups such as Life and the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children.
[20][21] In a series of focus groups conducted around the United States by anti-trafficking activist Laura Lederer in 2014, over 25% of survivors of domestic sex trafficking who responded to the question reported that they had been forced to have an abortion.
During abortions, PNI patients are also often subjected to forced sterilization - their fallopian tubes are tied, motivated by allegedly detected "serious complications".
[28] The Pre-Conception and Pre-Natal Diagnostic Techniques Act of 1994 makes it unlawful to divulge the sex of an unborn child save for medical grounds in India.