Pregnancy kit of plastic bag of semen and syringe helps Vietnamese woman drug trafficker escape death penalty

Desperate times call for desperate measures. And in the case of 42-year-old Vietnamese inmate Nguyen Thi Hue, desperate measures include getting pregnant to avoid the death penalty for her 2012 drug trafficking charge.

Thi Hue took advantage of a provision in Vietnamese law that women or female prisoners with children below three years old cannot be executed. Even without having sex with a male, she managed to get pregnant with the help of a plastic bag of semen and a syringe, reports The Telegraph.

She did not need the help of a laboratory to get pregnant. Thi Hue instead injected herself with the sperm via syringe and she conceived. The semen, though, was not cheap since Thi Hue paid a 27-year-old male prisoner $2,300 (AUD$3,243).

A syringe, in fact, is unnecessary since in Malaysia, all it took a teen to become pregnant is a sperm-smeared finger of a 61-year-old man who masturbated and then inserted his finger in her genital. The two did not engage in sexual intercourse.

The “wise” Vietnamese drug dealer is expected to give birth sometime in April, after which her death sentence would be commuted, assuming the infant is alive. The incident resulted in four prison officers suspended for negligence.

Female prisoners in different parts of the world where pregnancy is a way out of harsher penalty deliberately bear a child. In China, breastfeeding or pregnant women could post bail rather than spend time behind bar for their offence. Like Thi Hue, it is mostly female drug dealers who resort to that method to escape jail time.

However, Chinese President Ji Xinping has noticed the loophole and attempted to plug it by ordering civil affairs departments in January 2015 to establish institutions that would temporarily take custody of the young children when the female convict is serving term.