China’s use of forced abortions and sterilizations to weed out undesirable elements in the population is nothing new, declares a leading human rights expert, but reflects policies that go back 100 years.

“The practice of eugenics has been part of the debate on population control since Margaret Sanger’s visit to China in 1922,” Reggie Littlejohn, a China expert and president of Women’s Rights Without Frontiers, told Breitbart News Thursday.

“The language of ‘improving the quality of the population’ is not new,” Ms. Littlejohn said in response to a Breitbart News story highlighting recent revelations that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is doubling down on its eugenic goal of breeding superior subjects.

The CCP has reportedly been carrying out a “systematic campaign” of forced abortions, sterilizations, and implantations of IUDs on Uyghurs and other minorities to lessen their numbers while simultaneously incentivizing procreation among the Han Chinese, the dominant ethnic group in China.

“I have long been concerned about the eugenic overtones of this language,” Littlejohn said, noting that the CCP has no scruples about dictating who is allowed to procreate and under what circumstances.

“The Chinese Communist Party puts couples through a premarital exam,” she added, “and some couples — whose children apparently were not deemed to ‘improve the quality of the population’ — have been required to agree to permanent contraception or sterilization in order to obtain a marriage license.”

Reports on forced abortions and the sterilization of Uyghur women on a massive scale are “deeply disturbing,” Littlejohn said, as are “reports that that the CCP is practicing infanticide on babies born without permission.”

“The CCP has placed an estimated one to three million Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities in internment/concentration camps, where there are reports of genetic testing,” she stated, “and a tribunal has found that Uyghurs are among those whose organs are being forcibly harvested for transplant.”

“Does the CCP see this as another way ‘to improve the quality of the population’?” she asked. “If so, in my opinion, this constitutes eugenics by genocide.”

“Governments should press for an independent investigation of these claims, by an international team given full access to the Uyghur internment camps,” she said.

News of the CCP’s unapologetic embrace of eugenics in its latest 5-year plan coincided with efforts by major abortion providers Planned Parenthood and Marie Stopes International to distance themselves from their eugenicist founders, who similarly sought to rid society of “inferior” ethnicities.