Final summer time, when “Susan” landed at Gatwick Airport from Nigeria with a newborn baby in her arms, she anticipated to return quietly to her household life in West Yorkshire. As an alternative, she was arrested on suspicion of kid trafficking. Now, her title sits on the coronary heart of a disturbing Household Courtroom case that has uncovered one among Nigeria’s most insidious exports: child farming.
In response to BBC, Susan, whose actual title has been withheld to guard the kid on the middle of the case had been dwelling within the UK since June 2023 along with her husband and different youngsters. She labored as a care employee and had authorized residency. Earlier than leaving for Nigeria, Susan instructed her GP she was pregnant. There have been no indicators of being pregnant, and blood assessments revealed a tumor and never a child. Regardless of medical doctors’ considerations, she refused additional therapy and clung to an unlikely story: her pregnancies had all the time been undetectable, and this one was no completely different.
In June 2024, she left the UK, claiming she wished to ship the newborn in Nigeria. Weeks later, she returned with an toddler woman, “Eleanor.” However the narrative she spun shortly fell aside.
When DNA assessments confirmed no organic hyperlink between the newborn and both Susan or her husband, her rationalization pivoted: it was an IVF child, she claimed, that’s conceived with donor egg and sperm. To show her story, she submitted shaky documentation: a solid IVF report and a suspicious delivery certificates from a Nigerian hospital. The accompanying photographs, taken in what seemed to be a supply suite, had been blurry and inconclusive.
The girl in them was faceless. One photograph featured a unadorned lady with a placenta between her legs. “Somebody had given delivery,” mentioned the Nigerian physician who signed the doc. “It simply wasn’t Susan.”
That physician would later admit that impersonation is widespread. In response to social employee and little one safety knowledgeable Henrietta Coker, who investigated the case for the Household Courtroom in Leeds, the situation is symptomatic of a wider little one trafficking ecosystem in Nigeria. Her work in each the UK and Nigeria has revealed how some ladies, determined to look fertile or broaden their households, flip to illicit child farms the place newborns are bought and smuggled out beneath false pretenses.
Coker’s investigation took her deep into Lagos’s unregulated fertility underworld. She visited the supposed IVF clinic listed in Susan’s paperwork—there was no report of her there, and the clinic’s administration mentioned the paperwork had been faked. The “hospital” the place Susan allegedly gave delivery was, in actuality, a dingy three-bedroom residence with peeling partitions, soiled carpets, and teenage women dressed as nurses.
It was, Coker instructed the courtroom, a basic child manufacturing facility. “Typically these women are kidnapped, raped, and made to offer delivery repeatedly,” she testified. “Different instances, they die in labour or are murdered.”
Whereas Susan’s case is disturbing by itself, it’s also emblematic of a broader, darker commerce that sees infants purchased, bought, and smuggled into nations just like the UK beneath elaborate ruses. In response to the Nigerian authorities, over 200 child factories have been shut down within the final 5 years. But, consultants consider many proceed to function in secrecy, with solid paperwork and complicit healthcare staff conserving the commerce alive.
The UK Household Courtroom in the end dominated that Susan and her husband had staged a false delivery narrative and brought on vital psychological hurt to child Eleanor. The courtroom ordered that the kid be positioned for adoption, stripping the couple of any parental rights and declaring a “non-parentage” standing.
However how does somebody like Susan, a seemingly extraordinary mom, carew orker, and authorized UK resident turn out to be entangled in such a grim system?
Mates and acquaintances described Susan as quietly formidable and deeply non secular. Her employer mentioned she usually talked about motherhood as her divine calling. She was additionally reportedly beneath strain inside her neighborhood for having “accomplished her household” in a non-traditional manner. In sure Nigerian diaspora circles, infertility or childlessness—whether or not actual or perceived—carries a major stigma. That stigma fuels demand for various, typically unlawful, routes to parenthood.
“Fertility is a deeply emotional, usually non secular difficulty in Nigeria,” Dr. Ifeoma Onyekwe, a sociologist who has studied reproductive strain in West African communities instructed BBC. “For some, having youngsters is tied to social standing, inheritance rights, even survival. Within the absence of regulated entry to fertility remedies, individuals flip to black market choices.”
Investigators discovered messages on Susan’s telephone from a contact listed as “Mum Oft Lagos Child,” referencing hospital payments and “supply medication.” The courtroom interpreted this as a digital paper path. One message learn: “Hospital invoice 170k. Supply drug 3.4m.” In at present’s trade fee, that’s roughly ₦3.5 million.
Nonetheless, Susan by no means wavered in her story, even after being confronted with DNA proof and solid hospital information. Her husband, too, insisted Eleanor was “a basic a part of their household unit.”
Ultimately, the courtroom didn’t purchase it.
“Susan and her husband tried to deceive the courtroom and the state,” mentioned Choose William Tyler KC. “They staged an elaborate lie and brought on emotional hurt to the kid of their care.”
For now, child Eleanor lives with a foster household. When adopted, she is going to obtain British nationality and a brand new identification. Her actual parentage stays unknown.
In the meantime, Susan’s story is a warning. It exhibits how desperation, neighborhood strain, and a thriving black marketplace for infants can converge even within the lives of extraordinary individuals. It additionally raises troublesome questions on how such youngsters are moved throughout borders, how faux documentation passes by way of immigration methods, and what international coordination is required to deal with a commerce that endangers the lives and futures of a number of the world’s most weak.
As . Coker famous: “The true difficulty doesn’t begin within the courtroom. It begins in locations the place infants are made commodities.”
