Inside Nigeria’s Shadow Surrogacy Market: Facebook Ads, Legal Gaps & Exploited Women
By DAVID JOHN-FLUKE
An Economy of Desperation
WHEN Temitope Afolabi’s husband faced imprisonment over a ₦48 million debt, she turned to surrogacy to save her family. Paid just over ₦2.2 million for carrying another couple’s child, she was promised transportation, accommodation, and medical support. But in reality, she was underpaid, overworked, and left with serious health complications.
Her story mirrors that of other Nigerian women who, lured by quick cash, endure the physical and emotional toll of surrogacy under exploitative contracts. One clause in Afolabi’s contract even acknowledged the risk of her death, while granting doctors and the intended parents—not her—the final say on life-or-death decisions.
For many, the money vanishes quickly into debts, school fees, and medical bills, leaving them worse off than before.
Big Tech’s Blind Eye and Misinformation Loopholes
Surrogacy recruitment in Nigeria thrives in plain sight on Facebook groups with thousands of members, where agents promise lucrative deals but conceal key risks. Despite Meta’s policies banning human exploitation, groups like Surrogate Mothers Nigeria and Egg Donor and Surrogate Mother in Nigeria have operated for years.
Only when confronted by journalists did Meta delete the groups, but experts argue that temporary takedowns don’t address systemic negligence. Agents simply migrate to WhatsApp, where misinformation is rampant: women are falsely promised “100% safe” procedures, coerced into C-sections, and kept in the dark about which hospitals will handle their pregnancies.
Medical professionals warn that these assurances are reckless. Surrogacy pregnancies, especially with twins, carry heightened risks of haemorrhage, hypertension, and death—risks routinely downplayed by recruiters.
Lawmakers Stalling, Women Paying the Price
Nigeria’s legal silence on surrogacy allows agents to operate unregistered, unregulated, and unchecked. While some lawyers argue existing laws indirectly prohibit commercial surrogacy, others insist that “what is not expressly criminalised is legal.”
Attempts to regulate have floundered. Two surrogacy bills currently in the National Assembly would ban commercial arrangements and legitimise only altruistic surrogacy. But critics warn that even unpaid arrangements exploit vulnerable women. International rights groups, including the UN, call for outright bans, viewing surrogacy as a form of violence against women and commodification of children.
Yet, Nigerian lawmakers appear reluctant to confront the issue head-on. Neither of the bill sponsors responded substantively to questions about reconciling Nigeria’s approach with global human rights standards.
A Market at the Crossroads
With no regulation, poor enforcement, and tech platforms enabling recruitment, Nigeria risks becoming a hub for a global surrogacy market that treats women’s bodies as tools and children as products.
As Afolabi, now selling dried ponmo to survive, reflects on her experience, she embodies the grim reality of an unregulated system: desperation drives women into contracts stacked against them, tech companies enable the trade, lawmakers look away, and in the end, the women pay—with their health, dignity, and futures.
