You know that with each failed round, the likelihood of success lessens.
But it is so hard to give up that hope. Making the decision to adopt can feel
like permanently shutting a door that was supposed to be open.
Our counsel to you is to respect
your anger and sadness but do continue forward to look at adoption.
When Sue
and her husband got involved in the adoption process, she was still in the last
cycle of an infertility treatment. As they attended meetings and read
information, they both got tremendously excited. Then, Sue’s period was late
and there was a strong possibility that she was pregnant. To her great surprise,
they were both ambivalent about the possible pregnancy because they were so
thrilled at the prospect of an international adoption! That’s when she and her
husband knew that they were doing the right thing.
We can’t promise you that your
sadness will go away completely. Sue says that as happy and blessed as she is
to have her adopted children, she still feels the sadness from the lost
opportunity to have children on her own. Vicki Peterson, executive director of
Wide Horizons for Children, an adoption agency in Boston,
counsels adoptive parents to “use the pain and sadness that infertility brings
to understand and bond with the child you will parent who has also suffered the
anguishing loss of his or her birth family.”
Here’s what we can say. We believe
that you will love your adopted child as fully as if that child came from your
womb. Please trust and keep reading.
Childless families are truly a diverse group. Some people
have made a conscious choice not to birth children, possibly for population-based
reasons or concern over passing along a genetic medical problem or because the
health of the woman simply doesn’t allow the option. If you have made a conscious choice to not
have children, you are probably looking at adoption with strength and passion.
If the choice was somehow made for you by circumstances, you may feel very much
like the families who come to adoption from infertility.
