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Virtually every state in the south eastern part of Nigeria has come into the news this year over the prevalence of baby making/selling factories, yet many of the stories have the same features: the young ladies involved are usually teens, and testimonies of their motivation hover from poverty to the wobbling promises of the ‘factory,’ owners; the ‘factory’ owners’ claims are either those of benevolent maternity owners or philanthropic Nigerians helping indigent, female pregnancy victims; the busters and other relevant government agencies seem to have the idea of the existence of the illegal baby making/selling factories long before busting them.
Again, It is not as if the business is peculiar to the region alone. Lagos state for one is very notorious for phony maternity and recurring stories of “the baby I took home was not the one I delivered,” “the nurse gave me injection and I woke up to be told my baby is dead and buried,” and of male babies being sold, on weekly basis, for as much as N2 million. Beyond Lagos and its environs, there are pockets of instances in other parts of Nigeria where commercial baby making factories exist.
However, as a league, or prospering industry of some sort, South East and South South Nigeria seem to be the new haven for baby making/selling illegal factories. The young girls from the area seem not to give any qualms to carrying a baby for nine months essentially for the purpose of selling the baby to make money.
However, our focus today is on Anambra state and how this illegal business has been flourishing with the connivance of state actors
Read the article below and form your own conclusion
The business of selling babies was made popular by some motherless babies’ homes run by government agencies.
Unknown to many, some of the people who ran the homes were in the habit of selling some of the babies to desperate couples who either were unable to have their own children, or wanted a particular sex.
The development sometime ago, made the state government to close down some of the homes and those found to be in the habit of selling the babies were arrested.
Infact, some officials in the Ministry of Women Affairs and Social Development were fingered in the deal.
At a time, only the rich were known to be going after such babies, but when the demand increased, many people started building hostels or using their homes to keep girls who were pregnant by accident. They encouraged the girls to keep the pregnancy with a promise to be paid a certain amount of money on delivery.
Among the enticing conditions were that the pregnant girl would stay with the Madam who owns the hostel and would be taken care of until delivery of the baby and if it is a boy, would be paid N1,000,000 and N500,000 if it is a girl.
Before long, it because a thriving business such that some of the women who ran the business who also employed boys to be impregnating girls for them for a fee.
Some of the girl, mostly secondary school students abandoned their studies and plunged into the business of making and selling babies.
Recently, men of the Department of State Service Drs, stormed a storey-building in Atani, which was used as a baby factory. During their search, 13 pregnant girls and five boys, who served as impregnators at the baby factory, were arrested. The owner of the place is still at large.
Off the Onitsha-Owerri Expressway, somewhere in the suburb of Ihiala – a town popular with the defunct Biafran Airport at Uli, – one massive compound with high walls is popular, and always a beehive of activity. Teenage girls and flashy cars go in and out daily. From outside, it is difficult to see what goes on at Spormil Hospital and Maternity and/or Iheanyi Ezuma Foundation, both located inside the complex. However, checks revealed that the compound is a factory of sort that churns out special products – babies – for sale.
Director of Child Development in the Anambra state ministry of women affairs and social development, Mr. Emeka Ejide, confirmed upon invading the complex that the Foundation is registered as a Non-Government Organization, (NGO) “but the latest discovery is not in the certificate given to the office.”
A police team from the state Criminal Investigation Department (CID), swooped on the facility on Friday, October 14,2014
. About 30 teenage pregnant girls lived inside the compound. Three of them claimed to be students of former Alvan Ikoku College of Education (now Federal College of Education, Owerri,) while others were secondary schools dropouts. The proprietress of the Foundation and her crew were arrested.
The police also stormed another baby factory, named Divine Mercy Motherless Babies’ Home, in Obosi, near Onitsha, but the promoters escaped with over 20 pregnant girls and eight babies before the arrival of the police.
How pregnant teenagers are sourced
NAPTITP identifies categories of teenage mothers. There are desperate teenagers with unplanned pregnancies. For fear of what the society, especially family, would say, they search for safe places to dispose of their babies and return to normal life without suspicion. Such teenagers accept whatever they can get and quit the scene.
Evidence suggest that the existence of the baby factories are fairly known to female students in higher institutions, and even among adult women in the society, such that the information of what to do or where to go and not often far when there is a teen victim
There is also another category, those who willingly get pregnant essentially for the commercial value of the baby. Convinced about where to go and the price of the baby, the girls get pregnant and place themselves under the cover provided by the baby factory for the period it lasts. Driven by poverty, the young girls lease out their wombs and volunteer themselves, as regularly as is biologically possible, to produce babies for sale.
Confessions from some of the girls, when rescued, showed that fellow girls in the schools, and or neighbours usually come up with the information on where (baby factory) to go get help when the unwanted pregnancy occurs.
For some of the girls, it gradually becomes ‘normal’ business: they often return to the baby factory when they run out of the money they received the last time. And how do they get pregnant? Some of them are raped while inside the baby factories: some are forced to have sex with the proprietors or hired boys from within or outside of the ‘factory.’
“The moment I stepped in there, I was given an injection, I passed out and next thing I woke up and realised I had been raped,” a rescued victim, who was five months pregnant at the time of her ordeal told NAPTIP officials.
When she asked if she could telephone her family to let them know of her whereabouts, the doctor slapped her on the face. She was shoved into a room where 19 other girls were kept; all had been through a similar experience. She said the doctor raped her again the following day. A week later police swooped on the clinic.
“When we raided the hospital, we found four women who had been staying at the clinic for up to three years, to breed babies,” NSDCS boss for Enugu state commandant Desmond Agu said. He further said the doctor/proprietor confessed he often hired boys to come and impregnate girls .
Government connection
Despite the orchestra of government agencies busting the baby factories, facts suggests that indeed most of them operate with the knowledge or connivance of government authorities in the states.
Responding ostensibly to checkmate the government leg in baby making and selling business in Anambra state, the former first lady of the state, Mrs. Margaret Peter Obi, announced a clampdown on motherless babies homes in the state. During the 2013 Children’s Day event at the Alex Ekwueme Square in Awka, she warned motherless babies’ homes in the state and those indulging in any form of illegal adoption of babies and outright selling of babies in any disguise to pack and leave without further delay.
She said the state government is working hand in gloves with the National Agency for The Prohibition of Traffic in Persons and Other Related Matters, NAPTIP on issues relating to children. Buying or selling of babies is illegal in Nigeria and can carry a 14-year jail term.
Reactions
The South-east zonal chairman of the Nigerian Red Cross Society (NRCS), Dr. Peter Emeka Katchy attributes the springing up of baby factories a new life style which is alien to the cultures of the people and religions.
An Associate Professor of Complementary and Alternative Medicine, Katchy said those alien cultural values are gradually taking over the customs and traditions, which resulted in moral debasement and latitude in sexual behaviour of young girls.
He said Christianity never- encouraged baby trafficking or’ surrogate motherhood, or selling of any baby. “In fact, Christianity forbids the contracting of a poor young girl to become pregnant and deliver the baby to an infertile man or a barren woman who might have misused herself at a young age”.
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“Abject poverty has created opportunity for this new vogue to thrive by young girls becoming pregnant as surrogate mothers only for their babies to be sold on delivery by available modern trained infertile mother, encourage baby trafficking and slave trade in pretence to modernity, whereas it is an aberration in Igbo culture which has made the people of Southeast lose their value,” he said
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