Selling your child...

I know someone who almost sold his child last year...for N1.5million. He was a student, squatting with friends, couldnt take care of himself properly, much less his equally young baby mama and the child. Someone offered to buy the new born baby, he was willing to sell.

Fortunately for the baby someone got wind of it, contacted the boy's mother, who came and took the baby from her son.

The child is being raised now by his grandparents.

I'm sure some of you have heard/read stories of people who sold or tried to sell a child. This sad situation is more common that most of you think...

Here's another one I read in City People Magazine...

Single mum sells week-old baby for N15, 000

Ijeoma Emeto, a mother of three is presently cooling her heels at the FCT Area Command in Maitama Abuja. Her offence was that she sold her one week old for N15, 000 to a neighbour who had been married for fifteen years and was without a child. City people gathered that Ijeoma who is a single mother, after putting to bed must have realised that an additional mouth to feed was definitely one mouth too many hence her decision to sell the bundle of joy.

But she did not take into the cognisance the fact that some other neighbours were aware of her new delivery and were watching her. And so when the neighbours found out that the baby was nowhere to be found and she could not give a reasonable explanation, they contacted the police.

Unknown to them, the baby had been sold to another couple who took the child to Owerri, Imo State, where the baby was again transferred to another woman who could help in breastfeeding her. When Ijeoma was arrested by the police, she initially denied the whole thing but as time went on she owned up claiming that the other family wanted to help her raise the child as they had no child of their own and that her good turn towards them was what fetched her the N15, 000 grand and not that she sold the baby.

City People gathered that the police are yet to complete their investigation and once they do this, they would charge the culprits to court.

*The end*

I'm not a mother...yet, but I can imagine the joy of looking into the eyes of your baby and feeling a kind of joy that is unsurpassed. So whenever I hear or read about a mother throwing her child into a canal, selling or giving a baby up for adoption...I can't relate with it.

So here's my question; is selling your child, under whatever circumstances you may find yourself,...too young, too poor, unmarried, no help from family and friends, not psychologically ready etc...forgivable?

And also, if you can't take care of a child and have no help whatsoever from any quarters, but don't want to sell or give your baby up, what do you do?