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Accounts from North Korean escapees continue to collect that disabled babies are being routinely killed soon after birth and pregnant women whose babies are suspected of having Chinese fathers are being subjected to forced abortions. Escapees say that this selective killing is part Kim Jong-il’s policy of racial purity and supremacy.

Ri Kwang-chol, a North Korean doctor who escaped last year, recently told a forum in the southern city of Seoul, “There are no people with physical defects in North Korea.” He said that medical staff kill disabled newborns and bury them quickly. Other witnesses said that they saw infants being thrown into boxes with plastic sheeting and left to die. After two days, two of the babies were still blinking, so a guard beat them with forceps.

The aid organization Médecins Sans Frontières left the country in 1998 after the government refused to let the group enter the “9-27 camps,” where disabled and ill children were being dumped. [The Sunday Times (London), 10/15/06; Int’l Task Force on Euthanasia and Assisted Suicide Update 2006, Vol 20, No 5]