Every first Sunday of the month, the ritual was exactly the same. When the pastor at her Redeemed Christian Church of God parish in Abuja called forward couples “trusting God for the fruit of the womb,” 43-year-old Daramola knew it was her cue to stand.
She navigated the aisle, her husband trailing behind, feeling the heavy weight of a thousand sympathetic eyes. For 10 years, they knelt at that altar, receiving the same prophecy: “By this time next year, you will hold your Isaac!” Eventually, they stopped going to church. Not for loss of faith, but for a specific type of exhaustion.
“You stand there while the whole congregation stares at your flat stomach. They pray for you to ‘break the yoke of barrenness,’ and you leave feeling like you’re carrying a curse. I realized I wasn’t going to church to find God; I was going there to be reminded that I was incomplete,” she recalls in a shaky, teary voice.
Her story is painfully familiar across Nigeria. Marriage is expected to quickly yield children. The timeline of a union is strictly policed by families, friends, and religious leaders. In many communities, a marriage without a baby dedication within the first year often becomes a matter of concern.
Infertility is rarely viewed through a medical lens but rather framed as spiritual warfare demanding prayers and fasting. As some religious leaders warn against the artificial nature of modern medicine, many couples are trapped between their faith, failing health, and a society that rarely sees them as complete without a child.
The chairs in churches and prayer mats in mosques are filled with couples navigating the grueling intersection of biological reality and spiritual expectation.
While prayer continues, the biological clock does not pause. In the four walls of fertility clinics, the enemy isn’t seen as a “spiritual husband” or an ancestral curse but as a diminishing ovarian reserve or low sperm.
Hope for miracles complicates infertility issues
In many churches and mosques, there is a rigid expectation of immediate procreation, with Christian clerics claiming it to be a divine mandate requiring absolute obedience. They often use the Bible instruction “be fruitful, multiply, and replenish the earth” as supporting evidence for this claim.
This creates a spiritualized pressure for infertile couples and is even made worse where medical solutions are viewed with suspicion. “Waiting on the Lord” can inadvertently lead to untreated medical conditions, severe mental health crises, and the social ostracization of the very people the faith seeks to protect.
A 2019 study of 117 patients in southwest Nigeria found that religious beliefs are a leading cause of “late presentation” at fertility clinics.
“When a couple fails to conceive within the first year, the medical advice is to seek a check-up. But the religious advice is often to fast more or sow a seed,” says Yakubu Ahmed, a consultant gynecologist at the Well-life hospital in Abuja.
“They spend thousands on deliverance sessions while their polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) or endometriosis goes undiagnosed and untreated. By the time they come to us, the woman might be 40, and her ovarian reserve is depleted.”
The spiritualization of infertility often manifests in three distinct narratives: the test of faith, ancestral interference, and divine timing.
Faith leaders often draw parallels to biblical figures like Hannah or Sarah or Quranic figures like Zakariyya. While intended to encourage, these stories can create a performance of faith.
Some discourage couples from pursuing in vitro fertilization (IVF), a medical procedure where an egg is fertilized by sperm outside the body in a laboratory setting. This technology is a primary treatment for various forms of infertility and a key component of assisted reproductive technology.
Though some religious scholars have begun to embrace the science, resistance remains. Concerns about the “sanctity of life” regarding discarded embryos, or the “purity of lineage” regarding donor sperm and eggs, often lead to religious bans on these procedures.
In some circles, a child born through IVF is whispered about as “less than” or “man-made,” adding a layer of stigma to an already expensive and stressful process.
“Initially, when I heard about IVF, we wanted to opt for it. But when we discussed it with our spiritual father, we were advised to hold on to God and wait for His perfect timing,” Mrs. Daramola says, shaking her head in regret.
While the biological clock ticks for couples like the Daramolas, the institutional Church offers a sobering and often rigid theological boundary. The resistance to IVF isn’t about a lack of compassion but a fear of the “artificialization of life.”
“We are firmly against it (IVF). We view it as part of a dangerous artificialization of life,” says Reverend Father Damian Amana of the Idah Dioceses in Kogi State. “We are rooted in a theology that holds a profound respect for the natural order. We believe that everything in God’s creation is beautiful and hence should not be adulterated.”
‘Shadow of myself’
Beyond all the stress and strains lies the staggering impact on the mental health of couples. Depression, anxiety, and low self-esteem are rampant. For the woman, the burden is often doubled; she is usually the one blamed and the one receiving the heat of every conversation.
“As a young woman, I became a shadow of myself. I could no longer dress well or even relate to people because I feared what they would say. I withdrew to myself and became a loner,” Mrs. Daramola says.
Some studies estimate that 30 to 68% of infertile women in developing nations like Nigeria suffer from mental health disorders, with “spiritual failure” often being the trigger for suicidal thoughts.
For men, the pressure can take a toll on their sexual performance.
“In addition to what we were already passing through, I started having erectile dysfunction,” says Mrs. Daramola’s husband. “I could not perform in bed whenever I was with my wife because I was stressed mentally. I will never wish my sworn enemy to ever journey this route.”
Societally, this pressure often leads to what experts call silent divorces—where the couple stays together but the joy is extinguished—or actual separation.
Mrs. Daramola eventually returned to faith, but on her own terms. She and her husband sought medical help in another city, away from the prying eyes of their local congregation. They are now parents to a two-year-old girl, conceived through a combination of surgery and IVF.
For many couples, the question is no longer whether faith and medicine can co-exist but how long they can choose to wait before choosing both.