Recently, I had a conversation with a co-worker whose daughter was struggling with infertility. She explained that they were deciding to do egg donation. She then asked why we did not decide to do that and instead went with embryo adoption.
I explained to her that during our infertility journey, there was not much we did not consider. When you are working to grow your family, and running into roadblock after roadblock, you find you're open to most anything.
We did consider egg donation. And sperm donation. We looked into each. And, after gasping at the exorbitant cost (particularly egg donation), that opened the conversation to whether we even would do it, if we could afford to.
I know several people who have chosen to grow their families with egg/sperm donation. I've heard all of their reasons for doing so, and most of those reasons made their way into the conversation with my husband, at that time. We explored all of those reasons - if one of is able to carry on genetics, should the other stand in the way? am I ok with an egg donation, so long as I'm still able to carry the child? are we more comfortable with a child who is at least partially genetically connected to us vs. not? etc.
Ultimately, we decided egg/sperm donation was not for us. The primary reason being that we just were not comfortable with having a child be only "part" genetically related to us. We either wanted a child that was 100% genetically related to both of us, or not at all.
I've been up and down the infertility road for too long to judge anyone who decides to grow their family in any way other than how they see best for their family. I'm sure I've been judged several times for our decision to adopt domestically, and then to do embryo adoption.
So I ended the conversation with my co-worker with best wishes for her daughter. I hugged her and told her I know how hard this road can be, and that however those of us struggling with infertility choose to grow our family, we really should all stick together.
Completely agree!! We did domestic adoption twice; then found out about embryo donation, and did that successfully and then we had a completely surprise pregnancy that we thought wasn't possible so we have a very unique family.
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ReplyDeleteThat was also our reason for doing embryo donation ....all or nothing. We were lucky to have a biological child already and we knew first hand that it was not his genetics that made him our child....so moving forward with the embryo adoption was very easy for us. We had no doubt that the child that came to us would be the Child God intended for us...just as He intended us to have our first child. I have to REMIND myself all the time that our genes are different....because honestly....it doesn't matter how we became a family....it just matters that we DID!
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