North Korean Refugees Face Forced Abortion and Infanticide.(Brief Article)

North Korean women deported from The People's Republic of China reportedly face not only detention in prison camps but an even more brutal fate: if they are pregnant their babies will be aborted or killed at birth, according to the New York Times.

Thousands of North Koreans have defected from the country and gone into China illegally. In recent years, according to the Times, China has begun to send them back to North Korea, where they are treated as "traitors and counterrevolutionaries" and imprisoned in detention camps.

Women sent to the prison camps are allegedly asked if they are pregnant. If they are, the babies are either aborted or killed, the Times reported, because the fathers are assumed to be Chinese. "This is a systematic procedure carried out by guards, and the people in charge of the prisons - - these are not isolated cases," Willy Fautre, director of Human Rights without Frontiers, told the Times. "The pattern is to identify women who are pregnant, so the camp authorities can get rid of the babies through forced abortion, torture, or very hard labor. If they give birth to a baby alive, the general policy is to let the baby die or to help the baby die with a plastic sheet."

North Korean officials have denied these charges, saying that it is "a whopping lie" and "nothing but a plot deliberately hatched ... to hurl mud" at North Korea, the Times reported.

However, several escapees from the prison camps, using aliases, spoke directly to the Times and gave firsthand accounts of the atrocities. Mrs. Lee worked in a medical clinic at the Pyongbuk Provincial Police Detention Camp in 2000. She watched one day as a doctor gave labor-inducing drugs to eight pregnant women. "The first time a baby was born, I didn't know there was a wooden box for throwing babies away," she told the Times. "I got the baby ...