Mar 272006
Reuters reports that North Korea has very few, if any, citizens with disabilities. One physician who fled North Korea alleges that infants with disabilities are killed soon after birth as part of government-sanctioned efforts to maintain the “purity” of the North Korean people. Assuming this is true, I suppose it’s not exactly shocking news. Authoritarian regimes are fond of segregating and even exterminating people with disabilities for purposes related to both eugenics and propaganda. After all, you can’t boast of your people’s genetic superiority if people with disabilities are mugging for the news cameras and making a nuisance of themselves. If North Korea’s isolation ever ends, I would be very interested in learning the true scope of its maltreatment and abuse of people with disabilities.
I just posted the paper I did on this very subject on my blog – it’s mostly referring to the forced sterilization of women with disabilities or those women who were thought to have one. I think it was Romania that put women in mental hospitals and if the women got pregnant, the babies were taken away. If the mom could reclaim the baby after 1 year, it was her’s. If not, the baby then became a ward of the state.
In so many countries the condition just all around sucks.
Have you seen the book My Path Leads to Tibet? It’s on my wish list and looks real good….