Peering Into the Stork Market: What’s The Deal With Baby Selling?

Earlier today, according to The Nation, the Police at Enugu State uprooted a ‘baby selling factory’ at Ogui, Enugu. A baby selling factory is an institution where females who were signed in or obtained illegally (kidnapped) are kept in an enclosed location and impregnated, and the babies they deliver are sold off to interested buyers. From this particular bust, the police were able to recover six pregnant ‘suppliers’, who were illegally obtained. These young ladies had been stolen from their guardians’ homes. Apparently, more profit is made when the brains behind the business do not have to pay off the teenage mothers. This story has raised a series of niggling questions. Since when? Since when did we have a baby factory? Is baby selling the new thing? Is it a trend? And then, where does (non-exploitative) adoption end and baby selling begin?

In a world where we have individuals with more babies than they can handle, who have stopped regarding them as blessings from above, and we have others searching and praying, seeking one for validation and purpose, it is only natural to expect that a mutually beneficial exchange may occur. One might argue that this is a recognisable problem, and propose that a possible mode of exchange would be to create a market; an arrangement in which those who want to rear a child but cannot produce their own make competitive bids or offers to raise a child someone else considers a bother. In fact, three of these legal baby markets already exist, and a bill passed to the U.S. Federal legislation to ban baby selling in 1955 was rejected. Well then. Let us imagine that the act of baby selling becomes a widespread commercial enterprise, and baby farms are household names. Imagine you could walk into a store and ‘price’ a baby. Imagine the chaos that would follow. Seeing as even a parent’s ‘ownership’ of a child is a grey area legally, we might have to battle with laws against kidnapping and slave auctioning. We might also have to battle the inevitable rise in these crimes. To these, and to the possibilities of baby selling becoming an ‘in thing,’ I quote 1st Corinthians 10:23: “Everything is permissible, but not everything is beneficial.”

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This article was first published on 15th May 2013

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