Former Director-General of the National Agency for the Prohibition of Trafficking in Persons (NAPTIP), Julie Okah-Donli, has alleged that some women fake pregnancies using steroids before acquiring babies to deceive their husbands.
Speaking in an interview on the *Kaa Truths Podcast*, a clip of which resurfaced on Tuesday, July 14, Okah-Donli discussed alleged fake pregnancy syndicates and baby trafficking in Nigeria.
According to her, women involved in the scheme are allegedly injected with steroids that mimic physical signs of pregnancy.
“They are injected with steroids. It gives them the semblance of a pregnant woman. Their faces are bloated up, and their tummies are actually very big. They look pregnant, but they are not pregnant,” she said.
She claimed the women also simulate pregnancy symptoms around their husbands.
“When their husbands are around, they pretend to be suffering from morning sickness. They spit, they pretend to throw up and all sorts of funny things,” she alleged.
Okah-Donli further alleged that the babies are usually presented after the husband has been deliberately kept away during the supposed delivery.
“When it’s time to have the baby, they usually have the baby when the man has travelled. Then he comes back to see a baby in the house. But sometimes if it’s the kind of man that doesn’t travel, they ask him to go and buy something… By the time the man comes back, it’s ‘Congratulations, you have a baby,’” she said.
She also claimed some women undergo procedures to make it appear they had a caesarean section.
“They actually do open them up to make it look like they had a CS. That’s how desperate these guys are. They stitch them back up,” she alleged.
On paternity disputes, the former NAPTIP boss argued that maternity tests should accompany paternity tests when a child is found not to be biologically related to the presumed father.
“We started finding out that during a paternity test, a lot of children were not the children of the man. But one thing they failed to do was maternity test, which would have confirmed that the women did not have the children,” she said.
She stated that maternity tests could help expose alleged baby trafficking cases.
“The man is thinking this woman cheated on me, whereas the woman bought the baby. So it’s not even the mother. You can have the maternity test to be sure that this woman is not the mother of the baby, and then you begin to investigate where the baby came from,” she explained.
Okah-Donli added that many women involved in the practice claim to have given birth to multiples, saying it makes the deception easier.
“Most of them say they have twins. They have triplets. They have quadruplets. Now everybody seems to be having twins and triplets and quadruplets because it’s easier for them to just buy them once and for all and deceive themselves and the world,” she alleged.
