Blog1 : Women smugglers and using pregnancy to do so.

In the article that caught my eye was on that spoke on a Canadian woman who used a prosthetic belly to hide packages cocaine to board a plane from Columbia to Toronto, Canada. She was said to look like a normal pregnant women that was pregnant, but the usual questions asked my person who see a pregnant women managed to get the women to react very hostile. The women became flustered when asked how far along she was. In doing all of this she gave herself away to a female officer who found that it was very odd. In return the officer felt the women's belly giving her all the evidence she need to take her into custody for searching. Under the woman’s "fake belly" they found 2kg of cocaine. The woman was smuggling 60,000 worth of cocaine and can be charged heavily and even facing five to eight years in prison.

Using pregnancy is the new form of smuggling? This is one of the many antics I have heard of people using to smuggle drugs across the world. This is going to start a new problem with actual pregnant women who even pregnant are told not to fly because of the risk but also because they will be profiled harshly like a criminal even when not.  In the article a female officer was able to catch this because of her familiarity with pregnancy and the usual reaction of an expecting mother. As said in the article the belly was “too hard and extremely cold” (line 13).  Most pregnant belly number one aren’t hard because their flesh and fatty and actually holding and belly and most of all warm due to the fact it is a belly on a living human.  Even though smugglers are getting a little more creative with their smuggling ideas they are also not thinking the whole plan through. The fact that the women got mad about the question of how far along she was wasn’t the smartest since she should know that off hand.  If it wasn’t for a female officer noticing these little odd things this women could have gotten away with a lot and soon other women would try this again risking themselves too get away with this, but also causing trouble for other women now that may not have that female officer that see that they are truly pregnant but maybe a male officer who acts a certain way because she is pregnant and a potential 

threat.

Shelby Powell

09/12/2013

4:14pm