Thinking out loud..on adoption issues… April 11, 2007
Posted by spacemom in : Weblogs, Parenting 101 , 9 commentsthere is an odd debate(?) on adoptive parenting going on. Basically a woman who is debating adoption is feeling unsure. She put this out there on her blog. Others commented and there is a ton of ancedotal "my friend did this.." crap in the comments. Then other bloggers jumped in to discuss some of these issues and items that came up in the comments.
I feel funny (odd, peculiar, not humored) by these conversations and debates. While meandering the infertility route, we did our second IUI with drugs. Our RE (reproductive endocrinologist) was not very optimistic. Since infertility treatment is covered in our state, you must try all of the avenues, in other words, we HAD to do two rounds of IUI + drugs before we could move onto IVF. He was very honest with us. He didn’t see that this would work. He wasn’t sure IVF would work either. We were diagnosed with "unexplained infertility" (which means "I don’t know what the F is wrong with you guys"). Discussions continued in our house.
One day we went for a walk on some hiking trails. I told Jay, "tell you what. I am not sure this bio kid thing is going to work. I am willing to use the resources we have and do 2 IVFs, but I am not going to wait forever for a child to join our family. How do you feel about adoption?" He was quick and to the point " I would have no issues as long as we adopt a Jewish child. We want to raise a Jewish family and somewhere there is a child whose mother wants him/her to be raised Jewish."
We discussed this for a while.
We continued with the treatments. Somewhere I wanted to have a biological child to know I wasn’t broken. Somewhere I didn’t care how the child came to us. We came to an agreement: we would do two and only two rounds of IVF. In addition to doing the IVF, we would start talking with our Rabbi about adoption via a Jewish agency. It would be as open as possible in the sense our child would know where they came from. We did not yet discuss open adoption or other issues.
The surprise came that I actually got pregnant with the second IUI+injection cycle. I had troubles with the early stages and thought we lost her twice. But she came to us.
When she was one, the discussions started again. I had a checkup and my ob/gyn asked if I wanted a referral back to my RE. No. Here was the plan. 6 months trying without help, mostly to get us in the mindset of having another child; then back to the RE starting at what worked last time. If this and 2 rounds of IVF failed, we would start pursuing a Jewish adoption. I did not want an only child (not that onlies are bad, it’s just not what I wanted for Soleil).
Imagine my shock when I got pregnant the 3rd month! And promptly lost it. And got pregnant the 4th month. And had very low progesterone. By some miracle, she hung in there (although a complicated pregnancy again) and we dropped our plans for IUIs and IVF and adoption.
So here we are, a family of 4. Both of my children are biologically related to me, but it may not have been that way.Our parenting methods would have been similar. We may have changed some things if our child came to us in a different way, but not by much. We would have instilled the same values and love that we currently do..
This is where I step on toes….Did I put adoption as a "second choice"? Did we put IVF as a "second choice"?
Is it odd that I saw all of this options as a pathway to having a child? That I needed a plan? That I knew eventually we would have children to raise, whether they were blood relations or not?
The blog debates interest me, but they make me rethink our choices in the sense of how I view other’s families.
I cannot change what we have done, but I certainly can try to understand the issues that others are bringing up.
And so I listen and read, and think…
