The Business of Babies is an on-going series by VICE’s Indonesia office looking at all the ways people have turned something so basic—reproduction—into a money-making venture. In the coming days we’ll cover the baby modeling industry, elite pre-schools, and explain how international companies convinced mothers their own breast milk wasn’t healthy enough.
It was the kind of joyous post sure to attract attention on social media. Agatya Untari, 23, uploaded a photo of herself with a positive pregnancy test, telling the world that, after only two months of marriage, she was going to have a baby. She knew it would get a lot of likes, but had no idea how far the news would travel.
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Within a matter of days, Agatya’s friends started to message her saying that they saw her photo on accounts advertising herbal infertility cures. Some of the accounts had thousands of followers, and in no time people had tracked her down, DMing her with questions about which pregnancy pill she had used. The answer was none, but that didn’t stop these accounts from stealing her image.
“My picture was taken without my permission,” Agatya told me. “I’m upset. I wanted to ask my friends to report them, but I’m a just nobody.”
That’s how Agatya found herself in the middle of Indonesia’s barely regulated fertility industry, a market worth billions of USD a year and driven by aggressive social media campaigns and unscrupulous multi-level marketing firms. These social media accounts offer desperate families a ray of hope with promises like “95% success rate,” and feel-good success stories of young mothers getting pregnant after taking these herbal cures.
Their feeds are full of photos showing the birth process in all its bloody glory. They post images of newborns mere minutes after birth, c-sections, and breastfeeding mothers. The accounts refer to all women as “bunda“—a polite way to say “mother” in Bahasa Indonesia—and are full of success stories of women who (allegedly) used their products, even when they didn’t. It’s impossible to tell how many of the photos were stolen from private accounts, but Agatya surely can’t be alone.
But the accounts are working. Most of them have thousands of followers (the highest I could find was 65,000 on one account). The comments are full of women asking, “When will we be graced with a child?” That’s because these accounts play on a national obsession with marriage and families—something all of us here at VICE’s Indonesia office have reported on before.
Young couples are supposed to get married. And married couples are supposed to have children. That’s just the societal standard. So when a couple is unable to conceive a child, people start to talk. The blame often falls on the shoulders of the woman, and this pressure can push some families to search for quick fixes or untested cures.
“There’s an idea passed from one generation to the next that women have to bear children,” said Yusar Muljadi, a sociologist from Padjadjaran University. “If a woman is married at young age and shows no sign of pregnancy, people will start asking questions. There’s structural pressure on wives who are not getting pregnant.”
I messaged one of the fertility accounts to see if I could get them to talk. The person on the other end of our WhatsApp conversation told me that her company offers would-be parents three herbal medicines, all which need to be taken three times a day. She told me that the herbal pills can help a woman get pregnant, that they were made from “natural plants with no side effects,” and were proven to have a “99.9% success rate.” The medicines—there are some for men and some for women—cost Rp 3.5 million ($254 USD).
I tried a second account, where the woman on the other end immediately started drilling me about my mensuration cycle, asking questions about vaginal discharge, and the “morphology” of my partner’s sperm. That account offered herbal remedies for Rp 1.6 million ($112 USD).
That’s a pretty big price range for herbal fertility meds, especially when you consider the fact that all of them are basically selling the same thing distributed by the same company, the West Jakarta-based importer PT BAE Orbit Senusantara.
PT BAE Orbit Senusantara is housed in a bright orange four-story office building in Daan Mogot, West Jakarta. The office was quiet when I walked in shortly after lunch one Monday in late February. After waiting a short time, a man who the receptionist referred to as “doctor,” greeted me and welcomed me into his office.
Eddy Rosady Arief told me that he was a “principal” at iBos Academy, a multi-level marketing training program that teaches people how to make money selling herbal remedies online. This “doctor,” is training an army of Instagram salespeople because PT BAE Orbit Senusantara is not a pharmaceutical company—it’s a MLM distributor.
The company shifted to online sales about three years ago, amassing a team of 6,500 distributors across Indonesia. It’s been a successful pivot, thanks in no small part to the popularity of their pregnancy programs. But are they real?
This is where it gets murky. Eddy told me that the company doesn’t sell any herbal medicines specifically made to help someone get pregnant. Instead, they encourage their MLM sellers to use whatever marketing strategies they deem fit, including pushing herbal medicines meant to restore someone’s stamina as an infertility cure.
“We don’t actually specialize in pregnancy,” Eddy told me. “We sell herbal medicines that improve one’s health, not to cure, but to improve endurance. The pregnancy program thing was initiated by the distributors. The company doesn’t really set any guidelines for it. They can do whatever they want, as long as they aren’t lying to the public.”
But there’s a fine line between pushing a product that promises to improve someone’s overall health and saying that improvement will also help desperate couples conceive a child. The company—it calls itself PT BOS now—offers its distributors an “ask a doctor,” WhatsApp group where they can learn the basics of how medicine and pregnancy works. It helps the sellers sound professional when they are speaking to couples praying for a baby. But why spend so much effort to disguise your herbal remedies as infertility cures in the first place?
In Indonesia, an estimated 16.5 out of every 150 couples are infertile. That’s a huge market where the only alternatives are costly medical tests that typically aren’t covered by insurance. Eventually, MLM herbal medicine sellers caught wind of just how many couples there were struggling to get pregnant in Indonesia and shifted their marketing plans to capitalize on a market of scared, and often misinformed, couples.
Then there’s another factor driving the growth of the infertility MLM industry—every order is actually twice the size, and twice the cost, of other herbal remedies.
“Imagine selling pregnancy drugs, how many people consume it?” Eddy explained. “At least two people, the husband and the wife. If you’re selling diabetes drugs, only one person will drink it. The distributors are more interested in selling a product to two people at once. It means more profit.”
At this point I was feeling pretty confused. I went into this thinking that the whole MLM pregnancy industry was a scam, that it was the kind of place where sellers wouldn’t think twice of stealing your photo and marketing you as a success story when you’ve never taken a single one of their pills. And then here I was sitting in the office responsible for importing all these medicines, and the man who trains these same MLM distributors was telling me that the whole thing had more to do with profit than medical fact. Why was he being so open about all of this? I decided to dig a bit deeper.
PT BOS sells four different products that its distributors market as pregnancy aids: Seagold Liquid, Alfalfa Concentrate, Neuven, and Vomeigen. The first two are manufactured overseas in Malaysia by Kin Herbs Pharma Sdn Bhd and are imported by PT BOS as “traditional medicine,” according to registrations with the Food and Drug Monitoring Agency (BPOM). The last two are locally made and still in the process of being registered with BPOM.
A spokesperson at Kin Herbs Pharma Sdn Bhd declined to comment on whether their herbal medicines actually had any effect on fertility rates and instead told us to speak with someone at PT BOS in Indonesia explaining that, “they are the people selling… they will know more than us from the testimonials they get from end user.”
So I called the BPOM directly to see if someone there could shed some light on how these herbal medicines were being marketed as pregnancy aids, even when people in the company importing the meds from Malaysia told me they don’t directly increase the odds of conception.
Maya Gustina Andarini, the deputy supervisor of traditional medicines, health supplements, and cosmetics at the BPOM, told me that all of these medicines need to be licensed by the agency before their are sold.
“You can’t start selling it before you get the license number,” Maya told me. “It’s just not legally feasible.”
BPOM only licenses herbal medicines that fall into three categories: empirically proven jamu (elixirs); scientifically proven standardized herbal medicines, tested on animals; and plant-derived remedies that have been tested on human subjects. The agency also monitors all claims made by traditional medicines to ensure that their packaging isn’t misleading or out of step with the facts.
But the issue here is that these meds don’t include the claims being pushed on MLM Instagram accounts on their actual packaging. And in an environment where anyone can pass themselves off as a fertility expert online, the odds that one of them could oversell a specific medication’s effects is pretty high.
“Some multilevel marketing is good, but not to the extent that it could deceive the uneducated public,” Maya told me. “In cases where the herbal medicine works, maybe it was just luck. It all depends on what caused the pregnancy. For example, if the medication contains antioxidants, it may help a woman’s womb, but that’s more of an indirect effect. Pregnancies depend on a lot of factors, so perhaps it’s true that a woman can’t get pregnant because of a cellular dysfunction. So maybe she needs antioxidants, but, again, that’s just one factor.”
There’s plenty of scientific evidence out there showing that traditional medicines do have an effect on our bodies. But pregnancy, something that involves two people and a long list of potential complications, is way too complex to say that anything, herbal or otherwise, is 95-99 percent successful.
I called up Dr. Berryl Imran Buhran, an actual OBGYN, to figure out what a couple should do if they keep trying to, but, for some reason can’t, conceive a child. Berryl told me that, sometimes, there aren’t any easy answers. But the process should always start with a check-up by a licensed medical professional, not a conversation with some “fertility expert,” whose number you pulled off an Instagram profile. He said the hardest cases to diagnose are instances of “unexplained infertility.”
“It means both the husband and the wife have been checked and both are fertile, healthy, and having sex two-to-three times a week for a year but there’s still no signs of pregnancy,” Berryl told me. “These unexplained cases are hard to treat because we don’t know what the cause is.”
It’s easy for couples to fall for the promises of MLM fertility cures when Western medicine seems to have failed them. But it’s not a failure, it’s just means that not every fertility issue is easy to spot. Berryl urged couples not to believe the advice of people who are not actual doctors.
“Patients should still go see the doctor,” Berryl told me. “Usually those who believe the social media marketing want it easy and fast. They’re impatient. Meanwhile, the earlier we can diagnose an issue ,the better. Go see an OBGYN at your local hospital, build trust and a relationship with the doctor.”
But the biggest thing, Berryl said, is patience. We all know there’s a real pressure to have a baby within the first year of marriage, but that’s not realistic for everyone. And just because it hasn’t happened yet, doesn’t mean it never will.
“It takes time to get pregnant,” he told me.
