Neighbors were suspicious of the daytime silence at the maternity clinic that came to life only after nightfall, though never suspected its disquieting secret — it was breeding babies for sale.
But recent police raids have revealed an alleged network of such clinics, dubbed baby “farms” or “factories” in the local press, forcing a new look at the scope of people trafficking in Nigeria.
At the hospital in Enugu, a large city in Nigeria’s southeast, 20 teenage girls were rescued in May in a police swoop on what was believed to be one of the largest infant trafficking rings in the west African country.
The two-story building on a dusty street in Enugu’s teeming Uwani district now stands deserted, shutters down.
Neighbors had long found something bizarre about the establishment, where there was virtually no activity during the day, they said.
The doctor in charge, who is now on trial, reportedly lured teenagers with unwanted pregnancies by offering to help with abortion.
They would be locked up there until they gave birth, whereupon they would be forced to give up their babies for a token fee of around US$170 dollars.
The babies would then be sold to buyers for anything between US$2,500 and US$3,800 dollars each, according to a state agency fighting human trafficking in Nigeria, the National Agency for the Prohibition of Trafficking in Persons (NAPTIP).
But luck ran out for the gynecologist, said to be in his 50s, when a woman to whom he had sold a day-old infant was caught by Nigeria’s Security and Civil Defense Service (NSCDS) while trying to smuggle the child to Lagos, the security agency said.
Statistics on the prevalence of baby breeding are hard to come by, but anti-trafficking campaigners say it is widespread and run by well-organized criminal syndicates.
“We believe the scope is much wider than we know,” said Ijeoma Okoronkwo, head of NAPTIP.
“It has been happening over time, but we did not know. The first indication we had about this came in December 2006, when an NGO raised the alarm and told us babies were being exchanged for cash and that there were a number of hospitals involved,” she said.
BREEDING BABIES
The practice takes varying forms. One is where desperate teenagers with unplanned pregnancies, fearing ostracism by society, get lured to a clinic and are forced to turn over their babies.
The girls are so intimidated many can hardly relate their experience freely.
But one brave victim, an 18-year-old, who asked not to be named for fear of reprisal, recounted her weeklong ordeal when she was trapped inside one of the clinics days before it was raided by police.
“The moment I stepped in there, I was given an injection, I passed out and next thing I woke up and realized I had been raped,” said the girl, who was five months pregnant at the time of her ordeal.
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.
Another category of young women, driven by deep poverty, lease out their wombs and volunteer themselves, as regularly as is biologically possible, to produce babies for sale.
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