Child harvesting

Child harvesting is the active drafting of parents and children for the adoption market and is particularly associated with and prevalent in some international adoption countries and markets.

Typically, a relinquishing family or parent is misled or lied to so they permanently give away the child for adoption without any hope of ever re-connecting with the child.

A baby factory or baby farm is a location where women are encouraged or forced to become pregnant and give up their newborns for sale. Some poverty-stricken women have stated they voluntarily worked at baby factories, motivated by the prospect of monetary gain. The children are sold for adoption, will work in plantations, mines and factories, will carry out domestic work or are sold into prostitution. Less commonly they are tortured or sacrificed in black magic, witchcraft rituals.

Child harvesting in Nigeria is a new trend in human trafficking whereby perpetrators of the institution use structures disguised as maternity homes, orphanages, clinics and small scale factories to lure pregnant girls to live and deliver babies in return for monetary compensation. The trend is precipitated by various factors including a social premium placed on child bearing, infertility and teenage pregnancy hastened by the unwanted social stigma associated with the last two factors. A black market for newly born babies 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. The first publicly reported case of a baby factory was inside a report published by United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation in 2006. Since then most of the discovered baby factories are found in Southern Nigeria with high incidence in Ondo, Ogun, Imo, Akwa Ibom Abia and Anambra. From a single identified baby factory in the years 2008 and 2009, the number of identified factories have increased to a total of five in 2013 and eight in 2015.

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