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Child harvesting or baby harvesting refers to the systematic sale of human children, typically for adoption by families in the developed world, but sometimes for other purposes, including trafficking. The term covers a wide variety of situations and degrees of economic, social, and physical coercion. Child harvesting programs or the locations at which they take place are sometimes referred to as baby factories or baby farms.
Pregnant women may face economic or social duress, or, less commonly, outright coercion to give up their newborns. [1] There are rare reports of women who are not yet pregnant being impregnated to produce infants for sale. [2]
Baby farms have been reported in Nigeria [3] and Thailand. [4]
Child harvesting in Nigeria is a subset of human trafficking. It often takes place in structures disguised as maternity homes, orphanages, clinics and small scale factories [5] where pregnant girls live and deliver babies in return for monetary compensation. The trend is precipitated by various factors including a social premium placed on child bearing and social stigmas around infertility and teenage pregnancy. A black market for newly born babies has developed in parts of the country to provide infants to wealthy families who prefer cheaper clandestine methods as a substitute for surrogacy, in vitro fertilization, assisted reproductive technology, or adoption through social services. [6]
The majority of the women whose children are sold are young unmarried women from lower-income households who are scared of social stigmatization as a result of an unwanted teenage pregnancy. Some of the young girls come to the baby factory after searching for abortion clinics, though others have been kidnapped. [6] Most of the discovered baby factories are found in Southern Nigeria with high incidence in Ondo, Ogun, Imo, Akwa Ibom Abia and Anambra. [6]
The first publicly reported case of a baby factory was published by the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) in 2006. [6] In 2008, a network of baby factories claiming to be orphanages, was revealed in Enugu, Enugu State (Nigeria), by police raids. [7] [8] [9] In 2011, Nigerian police raided two more hospitals, thereby dismantling two baby factories: in June, thirty-two pregnant women were found in Aba, Abia, in a hospital of The Cross Foundation; [10] [11] [12] in October, seventeen pregnant women (thirty according to some sources [13] [14] ) were found in Ihiala, Anambra, in a hospital of the Iheanyi Ezuma Foundation. [15] [16] Five more baby factories were discovered in 2013, and eight more were discovered in 2015. [6] Infertile women are noted to be major patrons of these baby factories due to the stigmatization of childless couples in Southern Nigeria and issues around cultural acceptability of surrogacy and adoption. These practices have contributed to the growth in the industry which results in physical, psychological, and sexual violence to the victims.[ citation needed ]
Poor women in Kenya have also used illegal street clinics to deliver babies to be adopted by richer women for payment. [17] These are sometimes known as "baby factories".
While they can be voluntary, women can also be kidnapped to be forced into a baby factory. Baby factories in Nigeria have coerced or abducted women to be raped in order to sell their babies for adoption. [18] [19]
Organized rings in Nairobi are known to abduct the children of homeless mothers. This is usually while the families are sleeping on the street but also through gaining the trust of the mother. [17] In 1990s, it was rumored that child snatchers commonly roamed the country in Guatemala, which has lax laws regulating adoption. [2] The state can also be involved in such schemes. During the One Child Policy in China, when women were only allowed to have one child, local governments would often allow the woman to give birth and then they would take the baby away. Child traffickers, often paid by the government, would sell the children to orphanages that would arrange international adoptions worth tens of thousands of dollars, turning a profit for the government. [20]
Women who have an unwanted pregnancy have been approached, often by healthcare professionals, to instead deliver the baby to be sold to those looking for a child to adopt. Police have broken up such schemes in India [21] and Egypt. [22]
Child harvesting is particularly associated with and prevalent in some international adoption markets. [23] [24] [25]
Child harvesting may also be involved in situations in which children are trafficked to provide slave labor. [12] [7] This could include in plantations, mines, factories, as domestic workers, or as sex workers. [12] [7]
There have been a very few allegations of some child harvesting programs that provide infants to be tortured or sacrificed in black magic or witchcraft rituals. [10] [15] [11] [26]
Tackling baby factories will involve a multifaceted approach that includes advocacy and enacting of legislation barring baby factories and infant trafficking and harsh consequences for their patrons. Also, programs to educate young girls on preventing unwanted pregnancies are needed. Methods of improving awareness and acceptability of adoption and reducing the administrative and legal bottlenecks associated with this option for infertile couples should be explored to diminish the importance of baby factories. [27]
In vitro fertilisation (IVF) is a process of fertilisation where an egg is combined with sperm in vitro. The process involves monitoring and stimulating a woman's ovulatory process, removing an ovum or ova from their ovaries and letting a man's sperm fertilise them in a culture medium in a laboratory. After the fertilised egg (zygote) undergoes embryo culture for 2–6 days, it is transferred by catheter into the uterus, with the intention of establishing a successful pregnancy.
Baby farming is the historical practice of accepting custody of an infant or child in exchange for payment in late-Victorian Britain and, less commonly, in Australia, New Zealand and the United States. If the infant was young, this usually included wet-nursing. Some baby farmers "adopted" children for lump-sum payments, while others cared for infants for periodic payments.
Baby M was the pseudonym used in the case In re Baby M, 537 A.2d 1227, 109 N.J. 396 for the infant whose legal parentage was in question.
Surrogacy is an adoption arrangement, often supported by a legal agreement, whereby a woman agrees to childbirth on behalf of another person(s) who will become the child's parent(s) after birth. People pursue surrogacy for a variety of reasons such as infertility, dangers or undesirable factors of pregnancy, or when pregnancy is a medical impossibility.
Egg donation is the process by which a woman donates eggs to enable another woman to conceive as part of an assisted reproduction treatment or for biomedical research. For assisted reproduction purposes, egg donation typically involves in vitro fertilization technology, with the eggs being fertilized in the laboratory; more rarely, unfertilized eggs may be frozen and stored for later use. Egg donation is a third-party reproduction as part of assisted reproductive technology.
Child abuse is physical, sexual, emotional and/or psychological maltreatment or neglect of a child, especially by a parent or a caregiver. Child abuse may include any act or failure to act by a parent or a caregiver that results in actual or potential wrongful harm to a child and can occur in a child's home, or in organizations, schools, or communities the child interacts with.
The main family law of Japan is Part IV of Civil Code. The Family Register Act contains provisions relating to the family register and notifications to the public office.
Childlessness is the state of not having children. Childlessness may have personal, social or political significance.
Child laundering is a tactic used in illegal or fraudulent international adoptions. It may involve child trafficking and child acquisition through payment, deceit or force. The children may then be held in sham orphanages while formal adoption processes are used to send them to adoptive parents in another country.
The Baby Scoop Era was a period in anglosphere history starting after the end of World War II and ending in the early 1970s, characterized by an increasing rate of pre-marital pregnancies over the preceding period, along with a higher rate of newborn adoption.
Human trafficking is the trade of humans for the purpose of forced labour, sexual slavery, or commercial sexual exploitation.
Fertility tourism is the practice of traveling to another country or jurisdiction for fertility treatment, and may be regarded as a form of medical tourism. A person who can become pregnant is considered to have fertility issues if they are unable to have a clinical pregnancy after 12 months of unprotected intercourse. Infertility, or the inability to get pregnant, affects about 8-12% of couples looking to conceive or 186 million people globally. In some places, rates of infertility surpass the global average and can go up to 30% depending on the country. Areas with lack of resources, such as assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs), tend to correlate with the highest rates of infertility.
Effects of adoption on the birth mother include stigma and other psychological effects a woman experiences when she places her child for adoption.
Surrogacy in India and Indian surrogates became increasingly popular amongst intended parents in industrialised nations because of the relatively low costs and easy access offered by Indian surrogacy agencies. Clinics charged patients between $10,000 and $28,000 for the complete package, including fertilization, the surrogate's fee, and delivery of the baby at a hospital. Including the costs of flight tickets, medical procedures and hotels, this represented roughly a third of the price of the procedure in the UK and a fifth of that in the US. Surrogate mothers received medical, nutritional and overall health care through surrogacy agreements.
Coin-operated-locker babies or coin-locker babies are victims of child abuse often occurring in Japan, in which infants are left in public lockers. There are two main variables that account for the differences in frequency and the type of these child abuse cases: social and economical. Predominantly neonates and male babies, the murder of infants became a form of population control in Japan, being discovered 1–3 months after death, wrapped in plastic and appearing to have died of asphyxiation. The presumption is that such lockers are regularly checked by attendants and the infant will be found quickly; however, many children are found dead. Between 1980 and 1990, there were 191 reported cases of infants which died in coin-operated lockers, which represents about six percent of all infanticides during that period.
Sex trafficking in Thailand is human trafficking for the purpose of sexual exploitation and slavery that occurs in the Kingdom of Thailand. Thailand is a country of origin, destination, and transit for sex trafficking. The sexual exploitation of children in Thailand is a problem. In Thailand, close to 40,000 children under the age of 16 are believed to be in the sex trade, working in clubs, bars, and brothels.
Nigeria is a source, transit, and destination country for women and children subjected to trafficking in persons including forced labour and forced prostitution. The U.S. State Department's Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons placed the country in "Tier 2 Watchlist" in 2017. Trafficked people, particularly women and children, are recruited from within and outside the country's borders – for involuntary domestic servitude, sexual exploitation, street hawking, domestic servitude, mining, begging etc. Some are taken from Nigeria to other West and Central African countries, primarily Gabon, Cameroon, Ghana, Chad, Benin, Togo, Niger, Burkina Faso, and the Gambia, for the same purposes. Children from other West African states like Benin, Togo, and Ghana – where Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) rules allow for easy entry – are also forced to work in Nigeria, and some are subjected to hazardous jobs in Nigeria's granite mines. Europe, especially Italy and Russia, the Middle East and North Africa, are prime destinations for forced prostitution.Nigerians accounted for 21% of the 181,000 migrants that arrived in Italy through the Mediterranean in 2016 and about 21,000 Nigerian women and girls have been trafficked to Italy since 2015.
AFRUCA (Africans Unite Against Child Abuse) is a UK charity, established in 2001 by Modupe Debbie Ariyo OBE, as a platform for advocating for the rights and welfare of African Children. AFRUCA was set up in response to the deaths of African children in the UK such as Damilola Taylor, Jude Akapa, and Victoria Climbie who suffered abuse. AFRUCA works both across the UK from two bases in London and Manchester, and internationally in partnership with agencies across Europe and in Africa. AFRUCA also heavily relies on the 1989 United Nation Convention on the Rights of the Child to form the basis of their work. The organisation's stance is that culture and religion should not be a reason to abuse children.
Child sexual abuse in Nigeria is an offence under several sections of chapter 21 of the country's criminal code. The age of consent is 18.