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...