building release - assert-free python library

[grbgooglefan]

How can I build a release and not the debug version of libpython.a?
I have seen that there are assert, abort statements in lot many
functions in Python code. I would like to avoid those when compiling
the libpython.a library because when this libpython gets used for
production purpose and it aborts, the application goes down without
any means of graceful handling that error condition.
How can we handle this?
Please help