Wombs for Hire

In Aba, Nigeria, Dr. Hyacinth Orikara is being detained for running a clinic that housed pregnant teens and eventually purchased the children to be sold throughout the world for various reasons.

There have been claims of the babies entering into a world of underground sex slavery, to illegal international adoptions. This sordid trade of babies is not new in a world that has traded and sold flesh for thousands of years.

Do you remember when the Tsunami in Indonesia and Sumatra also revealed a large child sex trafficking trade? Or the prostitution ring that is alive and well in the US, and is fueled by foster-care and neglected children?

More specifically, in Enugu, Nigeria in 2008, a baby farm was raided and the teenage mothers reported that they were repeatedly raped by the doctor of the clinic and local youth.

The Nigerian baby farms raise more awareness with the gross exploitation of women in developing countries who have extreme difficulty in generating income and taking care of the families. It also brings up the painful past of breeding farms during US slavery and the disruption of families in general in the slave trade.

In breeding farms, women and men who were seen as "good breeders" were housed and forced to copulate. Revered historian, John Henrik Clarke's grandfather was enslaved on a breeding farm, forced to bear numerous children, only for them to be sold. Clarke re-tells that his fore-father walked from the East Coast to the West, looking for his progeny and other family members.

Now lets slightly re-direct the billion-dollar trade of families in developing areas paying women to have babies for $26-a-day in countries like India. The "trend" is called "Wombs for Rent" and are exchanges between wealthy or upper middle class people from all over the globe, but highly concentrated in the UK and USA. These people create inequitable contracts with poor women who breed babies as a way to make money.

Somehow, this type of baby trade gets lost in baby trafficking.

I guess if Madonna or Angelina Jolie scoop up a couple of African babies, they are exempt? Hunh, but what is the difference. It is legal baby trading?