There’s nothing poverty cannot encourage. With the difficulty poor people have in making ends meet, they will always fall into traps set by the rich and smart people.
One of such traps is the new rave by the rich to have babies without carrying the pregnancy themselves.
Many young girls are now responsible for carrying pregnancies for rich families – for a price. All the young lady needs to do is devote one year of her life when she will be well-fed and be enjoying all good things of life, except outings. Food, drink, tv, full internet access, medicare, cash, etc. Everything all found! And a couple of bouts of intercourse from an unattached male to get her pregnant; or if the ‘owner’ prefers – artificial insemination using the sperm of the man of the house or if the ‘owner’ of the baby is a single woman, a carefully chosen virile and well-muscled stallion (There are many out there – lazy, stupid young men looking for the fast buck without doing anything illegal).
I hear the pregnant girl can negotiate, under secrecy, a good fee of up to N2 million naira for the baby she has helped to carry for 9 months for the ‘Owner’ who at some point may have to travel out of Lagos or Nigeria so as not to raise eyebrows when she suddenly appears for thanksgiving with a baby.
It is easier to believe that a woman carried the pregnancy when she was missing from the scene. Staying abroad is more believable since the ‘amebo’ there, is mostly for who is breaking into homes or doing something illegal.
Surrogacy is not new worldwide but you can always trust Nigerians to take anything to highest levels. There are several fertility clinics in Nigeria who even advertise online as surrogate agencies that can facilitate surrogacy from start to finish; but their style is different.
While there is no official legislation on surrogate motherhood in Nigeria, the business is booming officially and many of these outfits are smiling to the bank.
There are dangers, especially with those directly negotiated between ‘baby owner’ and the carrier because there is no protection from each other. Not that I know of protection laws with the agencies either. Blackmail may result in future when there is no law supporting this practice.
There is greed in it too. Some girls or young ladies who are out to make more money out of it are said to be looking to carry more than one baby. So it is possible that ‘Tina’ can be surrogate for Mr. and Mrs. Babatunde in Abuja and then relocate to Lagos to serve Lady Duru a year or two after. Why? Because the pay is good. One or two million Naira a year for someone who would not have earned 240k per annum as a marketer for an insurance company is a huge leap.
We have heard of baby factories before, where the owners sell the babies from the girls they accommodate to childless couples. These girls get little or nothing from the owners of these factories.
The new surrogacy activity looks like a refined form of the old baby factories because the women who look for surrogate mothers may not necessarily be barren – they just don’t want to carry a pregnancy that will affect their bodies and sometimes, health.
How morally acceptable is surrogate motherhood in this sense and how can we enact laws to guide us all?
Image Credit: glamour.com.
