'Miracle clinic' baby farms

[MixedFeelingsNoFeelings]

I just heard an interview on the Today programme on R4 (approx 8.40am) between presenter Anna Foster and Harriet Coker, a British-born, British-trained social worker of Nigerian parents, who's visited around 35 African countries to investigate baby farms. It was following on from the news story that a baby brought unlawfully into the country from Nigeria has been adopted.

On the news, the story was presented pretty undramatically, almost as just another angle on immigration. But what lies behind it is a shocking revelation, to me at least.

I had heard of the existence of 'miracle clinics' in Africa, where women can get 'treatment' and emerge with a baby. What I didn't realise is that these places are supported by an organised trade that kidnaps, rapes, impregnates, and discards women, some of them girls as young as 13 or 14 (and as Harriet explained, 'Unfortunately, some of them actually end up dead') - to supply these lucrative babies. Who are then sold on to whoever can afford them, in Africa and around the world.

Although actually, looking at my transcript of the interview, money was never mentioned. It was all about, in the interviewer's words, the 'primal human instincts for babies' and the 'big emotions at play here'. Plus the stigma of adoption in African countries. Which means that people 'maybe choose not to acknowledge it [baby farming], because it would bring an end to their [infertility] journey'.

Wtf? We're talking almost incidentally about women being forced to have babies, sometimes dying or being murdered afterwards - a worse scenario than anything Margaret Atwood dreamed up - and that's the angle? That people should consider adoption before buying an ethically irresponsible baby?

Is it just me or is this mad...

Horrific. And agree about the clangingly tone deaf presenter.

Another problem with the interview is that listeners might think, 'It's terrible, but at least the babies will go to loving families who desperately want them'. Which is a reasonable assumption, if you accept the (rather credulous, IMO) line that baby farms are all about satisfying 'primal human instincts' and 'big emotions' around parenthood.

We don't know what happens to the babies. Nobody does. Although from what we know of secretive, unregulated businesses that rely on violence and forced labour - generally, good things do not ensue. Their sole purpose is to make some people very rich.

Not sure I can or want to imagine what situations these children might end up in.

Oh god I hadn't even considered that possibility, but now you've said it, it seems so very obvious that unregistered babies born to kidnapped girls are going to be sold to whoever pays the most money.

The interviewer's reply sounds very much as if her instinctive reaction was to reassure listening baby-buyers that she didn't judge them for funding the criminals who rape women and girls.

I'm a recovering people-pleaser myself, so I'd think there's someone in her circle she was worried about offending.

Organisations like the BBC, our national newspapers and magazines are full of 30 and 40 something women, some of whom will be having fertility problems.

It seems to me that they and supportive colleagues have completely lost the plot. Just about every week there is another positive surrogacy story. This one falls into similar territory.

Yep. No matter how agonising infertility is, it is no excuse for paying criminals to rape women and literally farm them.

It's gross, but in a way it's logical. After all, it's emotions that are given as the reason for allowing surrogacy, for allowing falsification of birth certificates, and all the rest.

Clearly there are a fair number of people who think that big emotions trump ethics.

That BBC story seems to me to have many parallels with the trans industry. Scratch many of the TWAW people and you find a transing kid in their life.

I agree with the pp that once you get to a certain level of any large organisation, the is a cohort of women for whom IVF, surrogacy and adoption are all very much a part of life. And therefore, anything other than affirmation is the work of the devil.

Mother of God, that's even worse than the Magdenlan laundries and Mother and baby homes in Ireland, and they were horrific.

There are so many "human interest" stories being all fluffy about surrogacy that I've started to believe they're being sponsored by a surrogacy business.

Yep. It's all about the feels.

Of course, there's a hidden hierarchy there, of whose 'feels' matter, and whose don't.

I don't think IVF can be compared to this.

the is a cohort of women for whom IVF, surrogacy and adoption are all very much a part of life.

I don't understand what this means... for anyone undergoing those things it will be a part of their life at that time... is that what you meant? So people trying to adopt might understand the emotions involved.... but this is obviously nothing like that.

@potpourree @helluvatime Do you know what? I’m part of the generation where IVF and surrogacy were not part of life. If you were infertile for whatever reasons and adoption wasn’t an option for whatever reason, a couple just had to live with it. Every Mother’s Day, my priest invites mothers to stand for a blessing and some very good women stay seated. And the same for father’s day. And I squeak into the generation where stolen children were still a reality. As was the White Australia policy. I look at my family and my friends and wonder how much input into the decision to have those children adopted their birth mothers were allowed to have.

But, IVF in its various forms, surrogacy and adoption are now so normalised. So available. So affirmed. It’s now an unalterable change in thinking for all future generations. The whole concept is always sold as a good thing. Saying it’s a bad thing is to make a person a pariah. And for the past ten years or more, the trans industry has created itself in the same image.

But listen to my link to Suzanne Vierling’s talk about all the ways men make money from a woman’s body. Affirm the industry if you must but be cognisant of its realities, too. And that’s what the BBC presenter in the link provided was doing in the face of evidence to the contrary. She affirmed the industry comfortably because she couldn’t do anything else.

Off the top of my head I can think of two BBC staff who bought babies from exploited women.

Not necessarily from Nigeria, but a paid for baby nevertheless.

People still have to live with infertility now. IVF isn't a magic wand and anyone who embarks on it is told this.

I agree with the profit-making aspect, and I'm generally against surrogacy. What's your issue with adoption, though?

Women in media are going to know women in their 30s and 40s pursuing these options. They probably have friends doing it. They want to be supportive. So they commission positive articles - often presumably featuring their friends.

@TheSandgroper I am sorry you feel like this but it does sound like sour grapes tbh. Just because some people have shitty attitudes towards women who are not mothers, does not mean that the process itself is wrong. I was lucky enough to become a mother through IVF. Obviously if I had been born a few decades earlier that would not have been an option. That does not mean I am ok with exploiting women or trafficking babies! The only body on the line was my own. I accepted the risks for myself.

I've noticed that media puff pieces treat surrogacy, adoption and IVF as more or less synonymous, almost as if they're merely different shades of the same model of car.
So, it wouldn't surprise me if journalists do in fact class them as the same, which in turn may lead to BBC presenters fearing to condemn rape, in case it offends their colleagues who used IVF.

And of course, sometimes, you have to consider bloody stupid misinformed colleagues who might get performatively offended about condemnation of human trafficking, on behalf of their friends who used IVF.

...Just about every week there is another positive surrogacy story.
It's promotion. They are normalising surrogacy. Everyone is being taught to accept it. It's the next big money making, predator dream thing.

IVF is a way of increasing the chance of the sperm reaching the egg. I don't have an issue with that, although I can actually see why people would think it is "unnatural" or something.

Imo it's not on a par with involving a 3rd person.

Well, it can be more than that these days.

Doctors can select eggs and embryos before inserting them.

Women can have another woman carry the baby for her.

Men can have a biological child within any need to even speak to the child's mother(s).

IVF has definitely moved on.

That is not really true. Surrogacy can involve an IVF process but it is not IVF that is the problem, it is the surrogacy. Plenty of couples have IVF with their own eggs and sperm. I don't think it helps to lump them in together.

Yes, IVF is the process - it says nothing about whose gametes are involved.

If you're talking solely about donor IVF then best to specify that otherwise it's hard to know what is meant.

IVF doesn't generally involve another woman carrying a baby - that would more likely be referred to as surrogacy.