Teenager vows to keep B’Haram pregnancy despite being ostracised

RESCUED Borno State teenager Um Haleema has vowed to keep a seven-month pregnancy she has been saddled with by Boko Haram terrorists despite the stigma it is attracting after being impregnated by the insurgents while she was in captivity. Currently aged 16, Haleema, (not her real name), has said she would keep the pregnancy because her unborn baby deserves to live.

She said she was captured while trying to escape, along with three of her friends, as Boko Haram burned and ransacked her village and that during her captivity, she was forced to watch men, women and children slaughtered, forced into marriage and also forced to wait on a husband she hated. According to the soon-to-be teenage mother, her first few months in captivity were enough to break anyone’s spirit, let alone that of a teenage girl so far from home. However, she added that while in captivity she waited for the opportunity to escape, which then presented itself after many months, allowing her to return to her village in Borno State. Haleema added: “I had planned my escape from the beginning. There was a time my husband spent two weeks away, so I attempted to escape but guards returned me and beat me.” However, Haleema said luck smiled on her when eventually, her captors’ vigilance began to slip and she managed to escape and she walked for what felt like days, until she finally reached safety. She recalled that she arrived home to discover that her father had been killed by the same Boko Haram insurgents who had held her captive for almost a year just as she had become pregnant by her Boko Haram husband. Now seven months pregnant, the former Boko Haram abductee, says she lives daily with the fear of stigmatisation by the men in her community. Haleema added that local men have made it clear that they would not have children fathered by Boko Haram live among them, and have threatened to kill both her and her baby. “People in this village are rejecting me because of the pregnancy. Some will be happy to have me dead and many people are even saying that I should go for an abortion,” Haleema lamented. However, men in the village have denied threatening Haleema and her unborn baby. One local vigilante leader added, however, that in their tradition, the pregnancy is considered Haram, hence they cannot accept such offspring wholeheartedly because they can be like baby snakes. He added that he and his group did not believe Haleema had been forced into marriage and said that she and her unborn child would always be viewed with suspicion. He however declined comment on what he and his men might do about it.