I did not understand what the hoopla was about but the topic on the lips of everyone was the Director who had just applied for and taken maternity leave. Had it been anyone else but the portly woman obviously on the verge of retirement, it would not have been worthy of mention. However according to her colleagues, this woman had not even been pregnant and part of the angst was that management granted maternity leave to one of their number without medical evidence. To crown it, the news filtered back to the office that she had twins, a boy and a girl and she piled salt on their injury by inviting them to the naming ceremony.

Most vowed not to go because they felt affronted by a senior colleague’s attempt to make fools of them. They wanted her to know that they were not taken in by her claims, even if management was foolish enough to have accepted whatever reasons she tendered, this was just not done. A woman who was not pregnant cannot be delivered of twins.

I agreed that no one can be delivered of even a single baby without a period of gestation, but surely a woman or man was entitled to acquiring a child of their own and to seek paid time off to look after that child if it became necessary. Time off for family commitments is a fundamental right and entrenched in our labour laws, ineffectual as they are. I begged to differ on the issue of whether or not she could become a mother without ever having been pregnant or if indeed, she was entitled to maternity leave given the circumstances. To start with, the children she had were newborns. That much was easy to establish and I found out when I paid the traditional visit to give some money in lieu of soap to the new mother. She was their primary care giver and could in fact do with an extra pair of hands to help her cope with the demand of two infants. Therefore, she did need some sort of leave to cope. Tagging this leave maternity leave may be what  created a problem for her colleagues but then what else would you call it to allow her give the children the care and support they need while not losing her right at work to earn a living while raising a family.

The people that created maternity leave viewed procreation and child rearing as a social function that should be honoured and encouraged since without supportive environment and time off to raise children, the world may well run short of a workforce in time.

That the director was, as far as we could tell, not the biological mother of these children should not in my opinion take away from that right. Nowhere in the books of the Local Government Service Commission where she worked had provisions been made for leave for adoptive parents nor was maternity leave restricted to a certain age group. I mention this because one of the things her colleagues were not happy with was that she was too old to be a mother. ‘Too old to be a mother’ still sounds incredulous to me as I write this because the reason given for this opinion was that she would die before the children grow up, even in the common enough knowledge that parents of young children die all the time regardless of age.

Speculation was rife about how she came by her twins since nobody ever thought her to be pregnant up until the time she announced that she would commence maternity-leave. Some said she bought them from a young mother and then had the temerity to present them as her own. Others claimed she paid someone to get pregnant. None suggested that she might have adopted the twins, a real possibility that was excluded because of the increasingly common practice these days of buying and selling children.  So maybe that was the real issue for her colleagues, a senior public officer who might be engaging in what many consider an unsavoury practice. Yet she owed them no explanations and none of us found the courage to ask.

There have been several miles of newsprint dedicated to reporting and analysing this seemingly new phenomenon in Nigeria, but the question I would like answered is why not? Why should a woman not be allowed to identify and pay another to conceive and bear her children? Why should she not be allowed to buy a child or children from another woman who does not want them or is unable to care for them? Surrogacy is a concept that has been with us a long time. Many women, who for various reasons have not been able to give birth, have been ‘given’ children to bring up as their own by relatives. Sarah in the Bible entered into an arrangement of sorts with her slave girl so that she could become a mother if only by proxy. So why are modern women being vilified for making similar arrangements? Provided there is understanding and consent on both sides, there should be no problem and subsequent problems that may arise can be averted with appropriate legal agreements. The fact of money changing hands perhaps raises ethical questions but the reality is that it does cost money to maintain a pregnant woman in good health and delivery and postnatal care often costs money too. If as a woman I choose to be paid for the service, then it should be my decision to make as long as I am of sound enough mind to understand the transaction.

The sale of body parts does not receive as much censure yet these parts are often not replaceable and many times put the donor at risk.  Some women are highly fecund and could have many children with no trouble whatsoever. Deciding to make a living from her God given capabilities should not attract condemnation. The truth is she would be making some other woman happy as well as carrying out the social function of repopulating the earth. The only snag is that human traffickers and unscrupulous people seeking new sources of transplant organs might exploit such transactions. However, human traffickers and traders in human body parts operate very successfully already, and prey on the poor and the vulnerable in society.

By whatever process she came about them, I salute the courage of the Director for coming out openly about her children. She literally glowed at the church service during which the twins were dedicated to the Lord and had nothing but smiles for well-wishers and detractors at the party afterwards to celebrate the birth of her new babies.  Her husband left her many years before for her inability to have children and by her testimony, she had reasons now to thank God for preserving her long enough to see the day that made her a mother with children of her own.

Many women have had to go through the charade of a pregnancy, sometimes even their husbands are ignorant of the fact, to hide the fact that they have had to procure a child from unsanctioned sources. This has created an underground trade in infants and pregnancies, sometimes arranged by pastors, which exposes women and children to exploitation. Surrogacy is something that should be brought out of the closet and legislated to the benefit of society, men and women. People should be able to rent a womb or adopt a child and be supported through the process by competent agencies. There should also be workplace provisions, which will not deny the individual’s fundamental rights to a family life, for such arrangements.

Robot  Villager

# 1 I did not understand what the hoopla was about but the topic on the lips of everyone was the Director who had just applied for and taken maternity leave. Had it been anyone else but the portly woma...Read the full article. Posted by Robot| 26.09.2008 19:09

emj  Villager

# 2 Many women have had to go through the charade of a pregnancy, sometimes even their husbands are ignorant of the fact, to hide the fact that they have had to procure a child from unsanctioned sources. This has created an underground trade in infants and pregnancies, sometimes arranged by pastors, which exposes women and children to exploitation. Surrogacy is something that should be brought out of the closet and legislated to the benefit of society, men and women. People should be able to rent a womb or adopt a child and be supported through the process by competent agencies. There should also be workplace provisions, which will not deny the individual’s fundamental rights to a family life, for such arrangements. http://www.babycenter.ca/preconception/fertilitytreatments/surrogacy/ Posted by emj| 26.09.2008 21:53