Former Director-General of the National Agency for the Prohibition of Trafficking in Persons, Julie Okah-Donli, has alleged that some women use steroids to fake pregnancies before obtaining babies to convince their husbands they gave birth.
Okah-Donli made the claim in a resurfaced interview that circulated on Tuesday during her appearance on the Kaa Truths Podcast. She spoke about alleged fake pregnancy syndicates and baby trafficking in Nigeria.
According to her, women involved in the scheme are allegedly injected with steroids that make them appear heavily pregnant.
“They are injected with steroids. So when they inject them with these 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 imitate pregnancy symptoms, including morning sickness, vomiting and spitting, especially in the presence of 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 said.
Okah-Donli further alleged that the women often arrange for the supposed childbirth to take place while their husbands are away or send them on errands before presenting them with a baby upon their return.
“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 alleged.
She also claimed that some women undergo fake surgical procedures to make it appear they delivered through 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.
The former NAPTIP Director-General linked the alleged practice to cases in which paternity tests show that children are not biologically related to their presumed fathers.
She maintained that maternity tests should also be carried out in such cases.
“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.
Okah-Donli stated that maternity testing could determine whether a woman actually gave birth to the child and help investigators uncover suspected cases of baby trafficking.
“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 said.
She further alleged that some women claim to have twins, triplets or quadruplets because 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.
Okah-Donli was appointed Director-General of NAPTIP by former President Muhammadu Buhari in 2017, where she led the agency’s campaign against human trafficking and related offences.
Her remarks on the podcast were not backed by specific evidence, and the allegations remain her personal claims.