Adoption
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just visiting w/ ?s
If you don't mind my asking how did you ladies make the decision to adopt? I know many of you have struggled w/ IF but what about those who have there own kids how did you make the decision? Dh and I are discussing our options as far as having another vs. adopting. I had two complicated pg and two preemie babies. We are very lucky that neither of them have had any complications from being preemie and my mfm is optimistic if we wanted to try again. So what things did you take into consideration when making this decision?
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Re: just visiting w/ ?s
My DH and I have never even TTC. The main reason we are adopting is because neither of us have health insurance through our employers, and I have been turned down for every individual health insurance policy in our state that offers maternity coverage. We're not willing to take the financial risk of getting pregnant without insurance for the pregnancy. I also have PCOS and a while back started charting to learn about my cycle. It turns out I don't ovulate. So even if we did have better health insurance, I would need some type of fertility treatment to get pregnant.
I was upset when I found out that I couldn't get health insurance. However, I have always been very open to the idea of adoption, so I discussed it with DH and he is on board. So we moved our focus to adoption.
The idea of not having a bio child really doesn't bother me at all. Honestly, DH and I don't have amazing genes to pass on or anything. We're both overweight, have suffered from depression, and we both have a long family history of diabetes, cancer, and other issues. My only major concerns about adopting are regarding prenatal care and any family history of serious mental illness (bipolar, schizophrenia, etc). I also have absolutely no desire to be pregnant. Some woman really want the experience of feeling a baby inside of her, but that's not me. The only thing I think I would really miss is breastfeeding, so I'm considering adoptive breastfeeding.
The financial cost is also a big issue for us. Adoption is EXPENSIVE!! If good health insurance does become available for us, we'll do some fertility treatments and TTC for a bio child. This is mostly because of the expense of adoption, though! I'm not interested in any extensive fertility treatments like IUI or IVF, so if medication to make me ovulate does not work, we'd immediately move back to our adoption plan.
DH and I decided to adopt because it felt right. We were talking about options to build our family and adoption is the one that makes us most excited at this point in our lives.
I do have very irregular ovulation and Dr recommended Clomid but if we decide to go that route, it won't be for a few more years. Adoption just feels like the right fit, if that makes any sense.
We don't have any children yet either. We were TTC for a year with no success. I have a uterine malformation, some PCOS and do not ovulate. I did take metformin for a few months but that has been it. If we did want to pursue getting pregnant I would most likely have to take Clomid or move on to IUIs and IVF. Even if I did get pregnant with my uterine malformation they are not sure I can carry the baby anyway.
So at this point in our lives adoption is the perfect choice besides the fact that we have always wanted to adopt anyway. We are not sure how far we will ever want to go with treatments if at all. I love everything about adoption and probably will always go this way to build our family. :-)
Hi! I have a biological son (through IVF and years of IF). And we have decided to pursue adoption for the rest of our children (and we want a lot).
Personally I don't want to go through IVF again and to be honest, other than child birth, I don't want to be pregnant again or go through the aftermath (I had a rough recovery)....
I know that any children who come to my home will be my own, so I don't care if they come from my body or someone else's. Adoption has always been a huge part of our hearts as well as foster care (which we do as well), so it wasn't a hard choice for us.
Lastly I want to provide a home for a child who needs one. For now we're doing DA because of DH's job and not being able to travel, but I'm pretty certain the rest of our children will come from orphanages in other countries.... and we won't be as limited to "young children".
Good luck with your choice.
DH and I do not have any biological children, but we do have a daughter through adoption. We decided to look at IVF and adoption at the same time. When IVF didn't work (3 times) and the insurance had run out, we moved on. Our doctor suggested IVF with donor eggs at that point, and we just didn't think the risk of it not working was worth the risk of losing a lot of money that we could put toward adoption.
We both have a lot of connections to adoption -- friends, coworkers, etc. We know a lot of people that have positive stories about adoption and that helped us make our choice as well.
DH and I always knew we wanted to adopt (me, I think, more so). He is very happy with one LO but said he would also like another, but no more than 2. I also (similar to MayDay) had a rough pg (I was on Zofran for 5 months and went 11 days overdue, failed induction & c-section, which was surprisingly the easiest part of the whole thing for me) and I have no desire to be pg again. Knowing that we will only have a 2 child family, we decided to pursue IA.
Hi! I had a hysterectomy, so our options for baby #2 were pretty limited. FWIW, my son was also a preemie.
You asked what to take into consideration. Well, aside from the normal adoption items to consider (type of adoption, financials, time to commit to the process, etc), you also need to consider how YOU feel about adoption in general--especially since you have bio kids at home. For example: Will you love your adopted child as much as you love your bio kids? Will your immediate and extended family? If you are considering other races, how will that fit into your family? Etc.
Good luck! Just follow your heart, and you will know where to go
We've been pg a couple of times too, and have no children. We lost so much with those losses, and my body keeps getting more and more out of whack. Financially, I think I'm more open to spending the money on an adoption than trying fertility treatments right now. My body's not up for the IF thing and we lost about $30K in lost income when I had my e/p, plus what we paid for our medical expenses-we could have adopted with all that money.
More importantly than the money part is that it feels right. I'm at peace with the fact that our child will not be biological, and can't wait until we hold our baby.
My younger siblings were adopted through the foster care system -- I am my parents' biological child, and the oldest. My parents chose to adopt, although they could have had other biological children, because they just didn't feel an overwhelming desire to go through pregnancy and childbirth again, and they wanted to be parents to more than one child. So they chose to foster/adopt, to provide a home to children who needed parents. (As it turns out, my younger siblings were their first foster placement, and they were able to adopt them quickly.)
As for myself, like Go_Dawgs, we haven't actually tried TTC yet. We are looking at adoption as a first option because of some health issues. (We haven't completely made up our minds, which is why we haven't moved forward in the process yet.) I've never had a real urge to be pregnant, and because my younger siblings are adopted, adoption is a natural part of life for me. My younger siblings aren't genetically related to me, but they're my siblings just as much as they would be if we were genetically related.
It was very hard for us to decide. We have only had 1 pregnancy and 1 birth ... after 2 years of TTC after our daughter we found we both suffered with medical problems. After spending thousands and still being empty handed we decided to spend thousands and actually have a child. That's how we got to adoption.
I didn't have a bad pregnancy (some high bp and gestational diabetes) and I am one of those people who really loves being pregnant. One time wasn't enough for me. But for now, we'd like our daughter to have a sibling and for us to be parents again -- so we took the road that would get us there faster.
We will never give up on the hopes of getting pregnant. In fact, if we don't get any calls about adoption we have already said we will try a few more IUI's this year to see if that works as well. (Right now we're both on meds to see if it gets our bodies in better shape to do that). I say IUI's because we actually found a local doctor who can do that for us ... when we were seeing RE's we had to make a 6 hour round trip b/c there was no one closer to our home. I don't think i'll ever do that again. That put a TON of stress on us.
Adoption is in my heart now -- so I believe we will definetly adopt but we also really want a pregnancy again. We'll see what comes first!!
I also had 2 very complicated/high risk pregnancies, both of which resulted in preemies who spent several weeks in the NICU. And after both pregnancies, I had lingering health problems for months and months. By the grace of God our babies have no permanent complications due to their rough starts. However, we were scared to death of going through it again, because the chances of us losing a baby (or having devastating consequences to my own health) were high.
Even though we never wanted to go through those experiences again, we knew our family wasn't yet complete. (To be honest, we'd never given much thought to adoption. A few of our adult friends were adopted as babies, but that's all the exposure we ever had to it.) Shortly before we came to understand that we couldn't have any more babies, I can't explain it, but the thought of adoption just came into our hearts. And suddenly it was so clear that this would be our path, and it was really exciting! Truly, it made the closing of our "biological baby door" not a big deal.
What did we take into consideration? Well, the most important thing was our attitude/opinion of adoption. We can honestly say that it will not matter one bit whether our children are biologically related to us or to each other. Our children will all equally be our children, whether from my body or from another mother's body. We do not care whether they are even the same race. Along that line though, we have to consider how parenting a child of another race will impact our family; there's a lot of research and preparation that goes into it. We had to consider how our extended families will react to adoption. We had to consider finances - this will mean buying a minivan; paying those outrageous adoption fees; deciding whether to have 3 kids in daycare, or if I should become a SAHM; thinking about college...
I recommend reading a comprehensive info book, like Adoption for Dummies. It'll answer a lot of your questions and give you great things to think about. And if you're spiritual, pray about it! Good luck, whatever you decide!
This is how we are too. We probably won't TTC. I don't have fertility issues, but I have bad migraines and it just seems like adoption is something we are both drawn to.