By Agboola Bayo
Ibadan
A lecturer at the Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, Dr. Amaka Theresa Emordi, yesterday said “Nigeria needs sperm banks to curb infertility and childlessness in and across the country.”
The Political Science Senior lecturer Ile-Ife stated this at this month’s lecture of the Nigeria Institute of Social and Economic Research (NISER) tagged: “Women Bigamists in Southeast Nigeria: The Social Contradictions of the Feminist Struggles.”
Emordi declared that the proposed sperm banks, if established by the federal government, would go a long way towards reducing problem of infertility and childlessness in Nigeria as a whole.
“Government should establish sperm banks and encourage anonymous donors of sperms and female eggs to such banks. Such legal sperm and egg banks would proffer solution to the problem of infertility and childlessness which force women into bigamy,” she said.
Lamenting the negative effects of infertility and childlessness in the South-eastern part of Nigeria with the many women forced into bigamy, she said women without children in the area were devalued and sometimes demonised to have eaten up their children.
She disclosed that “in Nigeria, gender still constitutes one of the inherent obstacles towards the advancement of women especially in Nigeria and many developing countries despite their numerical strength.
“The law needs to ensure that the problem of infertility should not be a lonely road for infertile women but a problem that should be handled by both individuals involved (husband and wife). There is a need for gender solidarity and collective will by the women themselves.”
“There is the need for aggressive advocacy to provide medical, legal and social support for women seeking to have children of their own. This is because women’s exclusion/marginalisation does not occur in isolation; it is connected to other forms of legal and social exclusion.”
