Not quite. When my DW and I were dating it was uncertain whether she could bear children. Well, she could. We have twelve. My brother and his wife did have difficulty but finally, after over a decade, they finally had a child. Followed by three more.
My BIL and SIL tried for a long time for kid #2. Like 5 yrs. Someone recommended an acupuncturist. He said he could help her. She got pregnant shortly thereafter. Go figure.
Some people may conceive after long delays but with infertility, time is not usually on your side. In vitro fertilization is the only thing I know that gives a serious boost to your chances, but it doesn't get them to 100%. It may still leave them low. We tried several IVF cycles without success. Then we adopted.
Adoption has a nearly 100% chance of bringing a child into your family. Without your genes, the child may be quite different from everyone else in your family, but that can still happen with biological children, and anyway it can be great. You can definitely love an adopted child. You don't have to be related by blood to love someone. Spouses, after all, aren't normally blood relations.
Yes. I was shooting blanks and my wife had issues so we adopted 2 kids when we were 28 years old. Things like in vitro fertilization were a few years away when we started our family. 10 years later and with new technologies available we had a short conversation about trying to have one of our own...and decided at age 37, what were we thinking?
RB
ps: Adoption is a wonderful thing. I'm an adoptee in addition to being an adoptive parent.
Yes. I have three children, but had difficulty conceiving all of them. There are big gaps in their ages because it took years to conceive each one.
You're probably in a much better place than I was ten years ago when I was trying to get pregnant with my last child. There seem to be so many infertility clinics around that weren't around when I was having problems.
In my case, doctors could never find anything wrong with me or my husband, so it was always just a waiting game with lots of hoping that things would work out. I tried a fertility drug for awhile, got pregnant, but miscarried twice and then didn't have success with it after that.
The emotional toll and expense can be great. I actually would have liked to have more children, but I sort of ran out of time. I had my last child in my late 30s and didn't feel like I could go through the emotional roller coaster again or wait another 4 or 5 years to conceive (if ever), so I decided three kids was enough.
If the mother is Rh negative and the father is Rh positive, you won't carry it past 3 months. At least, that was the case in my family at least half a dozen times. If that's your problem, get a turkey baster and an Rh negative friend.
You may unfortunately be right about the difficulty of adopting with a disability; but are you sure it's so hard? There are a lot of different ways to adopt. Some just boil down to a birth mother choosing you; you deal with a "facilitator" who just puts people together.
That's not necessarily an easy process. How is a birth mother going to decide on you, out of everyone else who wants to adopt? You have to put together a sort of marketing brochure for yourselves as parents, and that feels weird. And you can go for months or years with nobody choosing you. Maybe you revise your brochure; maybe you revise it again. It can feel like a new form of infertility all over again.
It can also work, though, and in not too long. It may be worth considering.
I'm only 27, so I'm still willing to give it a try for a while before I let go of the idea! But your advice is good.
I've looked it up and apparently the disability issues only apply to international adoptions. We have the ADA here, which says disabled parents must be able to adopt. So that was good to find out.
I have many friends that have struggled with various infertility issues. Some have had twins and triplets with the help of fertility drugs, some have done IVF/ICSI and had healthy children, some have gone through all that without success and ended up adopting, and one couple has spent a couple hundred thousand dollars only to have several miscarriages and premie twins that both passed after a long stay in the NICU.
Some have a happy outcome relatively quickly, but for others, as another poster mentioned, the emotional toll and expense can be great. Not to be a downer, but I've seen devastated friends shut down for years as they devote all of their emotional energy and financial resources to having a child only to be disappointed over and over. No matter what path you chose, try to maintain some kind of balance...don't let it consume you. That's probably easier said than done. I wish you the best.
My wife and I had the opposite problem. None of our children were planned. Most of them were conceived despite birth control measures. I love our children but don't like surprises, so it was kind of like a punch in the gut every time my wife showed me a positive pregnancy test.
I hope a vasectomy keeps the super sperm locked up and unable to do what they do best. Abstinence is a miserable form of birth control.
My son got the snip after their 3RD (a wonderful surprise) was born and now 4 years later he found out from his doc he has a few "swimmers".....so nothing is 100%.
I have adopted 2 kids, and 2 kids from IVF with donor genetics. The stress of nature not working is difficult and can ruin a lot if you let it. There were times when we barely could look at each other. It was a lot of hard issues to work though as a couple. On the Bright side for my wife, it was a major reason that she left the church and religion all together. The story really only works for perfect intact families.
I send love out to you. No solution is perfect. The expense of the different options are difficult to overcome. If you can afford it and really want a baby, go IVF with a donor and whatever piece you need(egg,sperm, embryo). Don't waste time and money on other solutions with low probability of success. Time is your worst enemy. You and your partner really need to be OK with the baby not being genetically related to you. For some people that is too hard. Don't take if for granted that your partner feels the same. That really wasn't an issue for us, but we have seen real messed from other couples.
The support boards on the internet really helped my wife. I just gutted it out. I really should have talked with and opened up to someone about it. It would have helped me.
If you are really asking how to be ok without getting what you want. I have no idea. Best of luck to you.
If you need a baby, then you are correct that adoption is difficult. But around the world, and certainly within the US, there are lots of older children, siblings groups who need families. You can adopt within the age your children would be if you'd given birth when you first planned.
And while it is true that disability can affect adoption of healthy infants, where there is a much bigger market than supply, disability won't prevent you from adopting other children who are not so highly sought after.
Most states now have online catalogs of children who are looking for parents (true the catalogs are often out of date, and are definitely not all of the available children, but it will give you some idea of the types of available children and some may still be looking for parents. (The other good thing about adopting from the state older children, sibling groups and other hard to place children is that typically they can get free college tuition, and they come with monthly subsidy payments, and a stipend to pay atty fees or visitation expenses for the adoption.)
Apparently in the U.S., disability cannot make a difference under federal law. Internationally it's different because different countries see disability differently.
Yes, I have, and it has been the great heartbreak of my life. We tried for years with no success. It was discovered that my fallopian tubes weren't patent due to endometiosis and I was told that IVF was my only hope. However, I had reached my limit and refused to go that route. Infertility tests for the female are invasive and very painful, both physically and psychologically, and so are most of the treatments.
It is soul-crushing to fail at something one really wants and that most other people accomplish with ease. I went into a deep depression and stopped communicating with everyone.
I looked into special needs and foreign adoption and tried to have a home study done for that. Out of five agencies in our area, only one was willing to help. We needed to set up three appointments: one with the wife alone, one with the husband alone and one to inspect our home. I explained that I was unable to make an appointment for my husband since he was on an extended business trip in Europe that had no firm end date. The social worker then stated that I was obviously not serious about adoption since I wasn't willing to set up a time for my husband to meet her. She could not see that my husband's schedule was out of my control.
Next I tried the foster system in my county. However, as soon as the person who answered the phone heard my voice, she asked if I was white. When I replied that I am, she told me that they would not place a black or hispanic child with me and they had no white children. I told her I was not necessarily looking for a white child and asked if a loving home was considered better than no home at all. She said that they don't have any trouble finding homes for their children and HUNG UP ON ME!
Then my neighbor told me she recently aborted her second pregnancy because she didn't want another child and her daughter did not want a sibling. I expressed disppointment that she hadn't given it to me to raise, since she knew what was happening in my life. I was shocked when she told me she did not want anyone else raising her child! I had a hard time refraining from saying, "so you had it killed".
I kept trying to remain hopeful and optimistic that things would work out in the end, even though the experience was soul-shattering. I was soon to learn, however, that my husband really did not want to adopt. He felt that it would be "someone else's child" we would be raising and not "our own". I was unable to convince him that adoption would make the child our own, despite his or her genetic differences.
I wish you luck in adopting and hope you don't have to go through what I did.