Poster advertising a witchdoctor's service [Image: Pkemoi Ng'enoh/Standard]

It is not easy not being able to conceive. This is what John Munyua and Philomena Wairimu of Banana, Kiambu, say.

The couple are clocking 21 years since getting married in a church wedding.

“We have been called names. We have been abused. We have been looked down upon. We stopped caring what people said at some point,” says Munyua.

Society, Wairimu says, is hostile to couples who cannot conceive. Munyua and his wife even fell out with the man’s parents “because the baby was taking too long to come,” he says.

They were eventually chased away from his father’s home and had to seek refuge at his grandmother’s.

Stigma, Wairimu notes, drives infertile couples to extremes of even visiting witchdoctors.

“I have tried everything possible – from doctors to traditional healers. At some point we were almost going to Deya of miracle babies but just before we could the story about his wife stealing babies was aired on TV,” Wairimu says.

Posters along Nairobi’s major highways like Ngong, Thika and Mombasa roads advertise fake doctors who treat banal conditions like loss of a lover and…you guessed it right: infertility.

“We have lost nearly Sh5 million looking for a solution,” Munyua says.

The couple currently have adopted two children – daughters they consider their own flesh and blood.

At Nairobi fertility clinic, Dr Gichuhi says, donated sperm is only given to couples and not single women.

“Couples pay Sh35,000 to have intrauterine insemination – a fertility treatment that places sperm directly into the uterus,” Dr Gichuhi says, adding that infertility can’t be fixed with a witchdoctor.

Couples who want to have a baby through in vitro fertilisation, where an egg is extracted from the woman and physically fertilised before being implanted back into the uterus, pay up to Sh400,000.