Good mum, bad mum

BY EFE OMORDIA

Some years back, while on an official assignment, I found myself in the same location with a group of “gentlemen” who were having a good laugh at the expense of an absent female who really wanted to get married to a friend of the narrator i.e. the person supplying his colleagues the info. This is how it played out; the narrator’s friend was in search of a wife and due to his stupendous wealth, family connections etc. had many candidates lined up. Unfortunately, the lady in focus, due to her weight was not a major contender, I am being nice here, truth is, she was actually rejected before the rich guy even met her. He saw her photograph and said he was not interested. She got desperate and begged the narrator who was the go-between that she would lose weight soonest. The narrator dramatized the anxiety in her voice, her willingness to do anything he proffered just to be given the chance to say ‘I do’ to the rich guy and that made his colleagues laugh the more.

Even though I was a bit irritated with her for further nailing the coffin for women to be respected I kind of understood where she was coming from i.e. a society where marriage is sometimes equated with oxygen. Even when parents are calm about it, aunties and uncles do not let up. The endless questions, the looks of disapproval, the snide comments are enough to rattle even the most confident ‘Girl power’ crusader haha but interestingly for majority of single women in their late 30’s and above marriage becomes secondary at the thought of a more frightening prospect i.e. not having a child. It is what gives them sleepless nights.

If I decide to take a survey of women between the ages of let say 39-49 who are single and do not have children to make just one choice between getting married and having children, I won’t be surprised if the bulk opt for the latter because apart from the pressure from society there is a core part of the female gender that wants to birth and nurture, and that other part that wants to post the child’s every activity on social media, or even do school runs, change diaper and the works. She may have been too busy with her career, world trips etc. in her earlier years to give it much thought but at this stage she yearns to be a mother and desperately wants a child.

On the other hand, for the average sixteen year old who gets pregnant for her neighbour, or some other random fella that made her temporarily forget all that she learnt in Sunday School or Islamiya, she is equally desperate to get rid of that entity known as ‘child’ and because she is not mentally prepared to be a mother, the unborn child in this case is viewed as a distraction for carefully laid out plans, as a shameful symbol, in the eyes of the family, religious institutions and most pressingly as a burden to look after.

A 2012 Gutmatcher Institute report titled “The incidence of abortion in Nigeria” estimates that there are 456,000 unsafe abortions in Nigeria every year. Just imagine for a second that this archetypal teenager who wants to get rid of her offspring encounters that older woman that needs a child? She would definitely be more than willing to hand it over but because we live in a society where laws can be tricky, outdated and self-serving it’s not that simple. As a matter of fact, if she hands over that child to another person to look after she might just find herself paraded in the news with kidnappers, terrorists and the like and called all sorts of names. Granted, a number of people are involved in selling babies for unethical and inhuman reasons but have we bothered to ask if there are any who are just supplying a need and taking advantage of the gap in a system where a woman cannot voluntarily give up her child for adoption?

In Chimamanda Adichie’s very famous Ted Talk titled “the danger of a single story” she got us thinking with the story of her childhood where her mum would always mention the house-help in relation to hunger, telling the children not to waste food when people like “the house-help” do not have enough to eat but later when Chimamanda had the opportunity to visit the girl’s house, she got a different picture, an aspect that had never been highlighted by her mum. Chimamanda gave other examples in relation to her years schooling abroad but the message she simply was trying to put across is that viewing a situation from only one angle can be misleading. Let’s consider that concept to a fictional situation; let’s imagine for a minute that there is a 55 year old woman who never worked for the government, never got married and was never able to have children. This woman lives in a society like Nigeria that has almost zero plans for the elderly. She also lives in a society where the childless are regarded as witches or as an aberration of sorts.

Chances are that, she would try her best to have a children and so when the opportunity arises, she would grab it with both hands. I have seen three children at least whom I suspect of having not being adopted through the legal processes being treated like royalty by their adoptive parents. One of the number is today living outside the country and getting the best education. I have also heard a story of a couple from a certain part of the country who arranged for a teenager to go through the process of artificial insemination and paid for all her expenses i.e. looked after her till term as well as paid her a huge sum of money at the end. Just to have a child for them. I do not know if that is legal but how different is this really from someone who buys a baby from a teenager who gets pregnant without meaning to and has no plans of keeping the child? Not different, since the need is the same but some would say, why don’t these women just adopt? But it is not as easy as that. For some of those women because of the shame of being labelled barren, they prefer to have their own private arrangement, for others they have been frustrated by the entrenched system of bribery and corruption.

Some don’t have a chance because they are not “under a man”. Their single states makes them ineligible. However, some states like Lagos State have relaxed their stance and now allow single women to adopt children but we all know that some states that have been rigid in related matters are most likely going to deny single women the opportunity to adopt.

Truth is we can moralize and preach from now till we are blue in the face but we will still have people even married women who have had enough children who will opt to have an abortion so why don’t we save the lives of more of these children by relaxing our stance and making the processes more ‘user friendly’?

I suggest that the government set up whatever committees need to be set up, revisit these issues again. Find out what the needs of women who desire to have children are, those that want to consider the option of adoption. Safe and legal spaces can be created for females who get pregnant and are not ready for the responsibility of motherhood to have the better option of giving those children up for adoption rather than aborting them. Let a multi-dimensional advocacy (if it already exists) be heightened to first of all reduce the stigmatization as regards women who can’t have children biologically and want children through other means and also for those that eventually decide to stay without having children. Let the latter group be given options that would make their old age not a lonely and burdensome one. For example, decent and clean old people’s homes can be set up for such people. They can have programs where people in those homes interact with children in orphanages to reduce the loneliness for both parties. The conversations have to be ongoing in the artistic circles and other spaces to give women and even men who can’t have children a new lease of life.