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Monsters and Murderers
10/23/2003

This Telegraph article about the child killers in North Korea is hard to read, but for that very reason, we must do so:

Evidence from a number of women who have escaped from the prison camps of the North Korean dictator, Kim Jong-il, reveals a pattern of infanticide, principally due to concern that babies conceived outside the country might not be "ethnically pure" ...

... a guard took a baby away from a woman married to a Chinese and put him in a box nearby. A doctor then explained that since the country was short of food, it should not have to feed the children of foreign fathers. When the box was full of babies, it was taken away and buried, she said. It was not clear whether they were alive or dead at the time. ...

"The woman assisted by Choi was given a labour-inducing injection and shortly thereafter gave birth. While Choi watched in horror the baby was suffocated with a wet towel in front of the mother, who passed out in distress." ...

Two had survived for two days before a guard "came by, and seeing that two of the babies were not dead yet, stabbed them with forceps at a soft spot in their skulls".

And here's one in first person:

Then I inserted my forceps into the uterus and applied them to the head of the fetus, which was still alive, since fetal injection is not done at that stage of pregnancy. I closed the forceps, crushing the skull of the fetus, and withdrew the forceps. The fetus, now dead, slid out more or less intact.

Oh wait. That's Dr. Warren Hern of Boulder, Colorado, speaking out against the partial birth abortion ban. I guess the difference is the definition of what makes the babies undesirable — the definition of "ethnic purity," so to speak:

I received a call from another woman who hoped to become pregnant but wanted to be reassured that, in spite of passage of the "partial-birth" ban, she would still be able to terminate the pregnancy if a serious genetic defect were discovered at, say, 20 weeks of pregnancy.

The title of Hern's piece is "Did I Violate the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban?" To which, I reply, "Well, maybe not, but you're still a murderer, a hitman of babies."

Posted by Justin Katz @ 12:33 PM EST