If Americans are shocked by the news story that North Korean doctors kill babies with physical disabilities almost as soon as they are born, they obviously haven’t been paying attention to what’s been happening in our own medical profession. They are probably under the impression that doctors still take the Hippocratic oath, which includes the famed dictum “First do no harm.”

The original oath taken by graduating medical students is also used to proscribe performing abortions. Cornell Medical School has published a rewritten oath that not only omits those words but erases the prohibition against euthanasia. By golly, now the Cornell oath does not require its graduates to avoid sexual relations with patients. Why not just call it the Hypocritical oath?

A senior fellow at the Discovery Institute who is a special consultant to the Center for Bioethics and Culture, Wesley Smith, has been warning about this trend toward including killing as part of a medical act. He recently appeared at the CUNY Graduate Center for a debate on the politics of science and frequently writes essays on bioethics and the decline of the medical profession.

Mr. Smith has been sounding the alarm about individuals – such as a Princeton University bioethicist, Peter Singer – who do not subscribe to the idea that human life has any intrinsic value. Mr. Smith wrote in response to my e-mail: “To Singer, a newborn infant is the moral equivalent of a mackerel and an advanced Alzheimer’s patient is comparable to a pigeon. Singer asserts that his theories justify infanticide and involuntary euthanasia of cognitively disabled people and would extend to prohibiting most human use of animals, whether for food, clothing, entertainment, or in medical research.”

According to a physician who defected from North Korea, Ri Kwang-choi, the communist state kills babies born with physical disabilities. Mr. Ri told members of the New Right Union that babies with disabilities were killed in infancy in hospitals or in homes and are quickly buried. That’s why there are no disabled people in North Korea – with the possible exception of its leader, Kim Jong-il, whom some regard as brain dead.

This is hardly surprising news, because North Korea is a totalitarian country. What is truly astonishing is that this murder of the innocent occurs routinely in the formerly civilized country of the Netherlands.

The Sunday Times of London reported on March 5: “Each year in Holland at least 15 seriously ill babies, most of them with severe spina bifida or chromosomal abnormalities, are helped to die by doctors acting with the parents’ consent. But only a fraction of those cases are reported to the authorities because of the doctors’ fears of being charged with murder. Things are about to change, however, making it much easier for parents and doctors to end the suffering of an infant.”

Ah yes, the operative phrase is always “the suffering of the victim,” which makes it easy to rationalize killing the poor burdensome being.

According to the Times article, “A committee set up to regulate the practice will begin operating in the next few weeks, effectively making Holland, where adult euthanasia is legal, the first country in the world to allow ‘baby euthanasia’ as well.”

Let’s all stop pretending that this is shocking. The writing’s been on the wall since the 1920s, when the saintly Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood, under the guise of helping the poor huddled masses, did whatever she could to make sure they didn’t outbreed the “Aryan race.” In “Women and the New Race,” she writes, “The most merciful thing that a large family does to one of its infant members is to kill it.” As the youngest of six children in a very poor family, I will always be eternally grateful that my mother was a good Catholic.

Most pro-choicers have accused us pro-lifers of having a love affair with the fetus. This is true, and we also love the zygote, embryo, preemie, infant, toddler, teenager, adult, and senior citizen. We respect life in all its stages, and when human life is treated as dispensable in any of its developmental stages, it also becomes cheap at any age.

Consider our own Manhattan modern mother, Amy Richards, who killed two of her unborn triplets because she didn’t want to end up in Staten Island shopping at Costco. We know about her because the New York Times thought her situation deserved respect.

Maybe Americans will be shocked and disgusted after learning what goes on behind the Asian Iron Curtain. Maybe they will even be able to put two and two together and see that this culture of death puts us all at risk.

Today it’s the babies, yesterday it was Terry Schiavo, tomorrow … you?