Seoul, South Korea –Increasing numbers of North Korean defectors are making allegations that forced abortion and infanticide have become “the norm” in North Korean prisons.
The defectors say that prison officials routinely ask female inmates if they are pregnant, and those who answer in the affirmative are given injections to induce abortion. When pregnancies escape detection and female inmates give birth to a live infant, prison guards force the women to kill the newborns by smothering them with plastic sheets, according to the defectors.
Surgical abortions are not an option because there is “virtually no medical care” available to prisoners, former prison employee Lee Soon Ok, who has written a book about her experiences in North Korean prisons, said.
Observers say that while coerced abortions and infanticide have been part of prison policy in North Korea since the 1980s, instances were “rare” until China recently began deporting thousands of North Korean refugees.
The North Korean government immediately imprisoned all deportees upon their return to North Korea, resulting in a “sharp increase” in the number of overall inmates, including pregnant women. About 200,000 people are currently incarcerated in North Korean prisons.
The Times reports that the current “wave of baby killings has nationalistic overtones,” because guards intentionally single out women believed to have been impregnated by Chinese men.
“The guards would scream at us: 'You are carrying Chinese sperm, from foreign countries. We Koreans are one people, how dare you bring this foreign sperm here,'” one former prisoner said.
The allegations of former inmates, with the support of the private international organization Human Rights Without Frontiers, have received worldwide attention, including being highlighted at a human rights conference on North Korea in Tokyo in February and in the U.S. State Department's annual human rights report on the country in March.
European Union delegates to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights also raised questions about the alleged abuses in April, and the U.S. House International Relations Committee heard testimony from North Korean defectors on the matter in May.
North Korea, through its official Korean Central News Agency, has called the allegations a “whopping lie,” adding that the charges are “nothing but a plot deliberately hatched by [Human Rights Without Frontiers] to hurl mud” at the country.
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