Infertility and Adoption

I picked up the last of my medical paperwork today over the weekend. The doctor, seeing my adoption medical form, asked me in a polite way if I had experienced fertility problems. I told her yes, and that although I'm probably a great candidate for IVF, my husband and I had decided on adoption.

She told me she also has problems. She and her husband have been exploring surrogacy, which tells me her reproductive problems could be a lot bigger than mine. She said she was tired of the years of treatment and ready for adoption, but her husband wasn't there yet. A tired look even came over her face when she said that.

I'm so incredibly glad I'm not in her position. It took me no longer than a few minutes to decide on adoption, and then a few seconds for my husband to agree. I already had it in mind as a backup plan.

Calling adoption a backup plan is not a happy thing, but to be brutally honest, that's what it often is. It's rare for fertile couples to think of adoption before a pregnancy. One reason is logistics. Adoption is long, drawn-out, strewn with ethical dilemmas, uncertain and often extremely expensive, especially when you compare it to the "have sex, then wait nine months" recipe. I don't mean to disparage pregnancy in any way, but it's an easier path to start walking on, with well-marked signs, no matter how difficult, tortuous and nerve-wracking it can get before the child arrives.

Reading Adam Pertman's book Adoption Nation taught me a great way to look at adoption and infertility. The circumstances surrounding a child's birth, like those surrounding the child's adoption, affect a child's destiny but should not be allowed to determine it. An adoptee may suffer mental anguish thinking of themselves as a "Plan B", but other children may also be hurt by knowing their birth was a happy or unhappy accident, or that their mother seriously considered abortion, and so on. Just because a child does not have two parents that loved each other, fully intended to have that child and planned well for the arrival does not mean there is a curse on that child and their parents. Otherwise, for example, children of rape would be doomed, and so would their mother. No matter how a child comes into the world, they deserve the same love.

That's not to say that the child won't have issues with the way they came into the world. They certainly will. I know I'll have to gracefully deal with lots of these issues as the child grows up and do my best to ensure they have a healthy connection to their first family. From the foster care system, it's pretty hard to get a sense of how that will play out. On the down side, maybe they'll be in jail or be too unstable for regular contact, or vanished… or maybe the extended family will be such an integral part of the child's support system that they'll never have to wonder or worry about where they came from.

So as much as I dislike saying it, adoption was Plan B, compared to natural pregnancy as Plan A and assisted reproduction as Plan C. But now that I've started out on the adoption path, those other choices seem pretty distant. It bothers me when people trot out the old cliché, "now that you're adopting, you'll get pregnant". I go into geek mode and tell them that statistically speaking, that is entirely false, and that the vast majority of fertility-impaired women who don't get pregnant while adopting tend not to stick out in the public consciousness. It bothers me because I have made the mental switch and now think of pregnancy as a cold, distant, abstract possibility, not as something I really want or need.