Tag: IVF

2">Infertility Bets On Hold, Part 2

(If you missed Part 1, click here … )

While I’ve pretty much begun to resolve those par­tic­u­lar grief issues, there’s still that lack of strength that I feel I need in order to go through the entire adop­tion process.  Because it takes some­one who really has enough strength to climb over the prover­bial brick wall get­ting in the way of hav­ing a child. And specif­i­cally, I’m talk­ing about all the rules and reg­u­la­tions and inves­ti­ga­tions into your pri­vate lives just to raise a child that is not bio­log­i­cally your own. Quite frankly, I know that I don’t have what it takes to go through that.

Why do I say that? (And Kelly … hope­fully, this will help answer the ques­tion you posed to me at one time … ) Well first of all, I just know what I’m capa­ble of han­dling emo­tion­ally, and I know that I wouldn’t be able to sur­vive any fur­ther dis­ap­point­ment or heartache. Or as my new favorite quote from Pam says:

It got to the point where the poten­tial for more heart­break was more over­whelm­ing than the glim­mer of very small hope.

The sec­ond rea­son I feel as if I have lit­tle strength is because I have lit­tle con­fi­dence that things will come rel­a­tively straight­for­ward and sim­ple to us.

Not that I expect adop­tion to be an easy path. If we did decide to adopt, I have this very strong sus­pi­cion that we’d have so many more walls to climb. Give me a chance to explain … and I’d absolutely love to hear what oth­ers have to say to con­tribute to this discussion.

Let’s start off with Domes­tic Adoption:

  • Hubby & I both Asian Amer­i­can; Fil­ipino Amer­i­can, to be specific.
  • How often do you sup­pose any Poten­tial Birth Moms (PBM) would look at our dossier and — just by looks alone — think that we’d make great par­ents when their child will (most likely) not look at all sim­i­lar to the adop­tive cou­ple that they’d hope to raise their child?
  • Or that the PBM might worry that their child would face more bar­ri­ers hav­ing Asian Amer­i­can parents?
  • How often are Asian Amer­i­can babies given up for adop­tion; espe­cially if the PBM is also Asian or Asian Amer­i­can? Cul­ture dic­tates that fam­ily is impor­tant. If the child is not wanted in the imme­di­ate fam­ily; chances are that there is another fam­ily mem­ber (aunt, cousin, third uncle twice removed) that is will­ing to raise the child. Unfor­tu­nately, that’s a sit­u­a­tion that’s likely never going to hap­pen to us.

Mov­ing onto Inter­na­tional Adoption:

  • There are stricter laws and reg­u­la­tions from var­i­ous coun­tries in effect.
  • Some spe­cific coun­tries, like Rus­sia and Guatemala, have either sus­pended or have placed holds on any adop­tions to the US.
  • Wait time. Even for Fil­ipino adop­tions there are cer­tain stip­u­la­tions on how and when a child can be adopted; when the child can come back to the US with the adopted par­ents. And quite frankly, I don’t think I can afford the three-​​year wait in order to adopt a child from my native country.

And finally other, all-​​encompassing barriers:

  • Age: Let’s face it. Hubby & I are cur­rently push­ing 40. And yes, I know that there are cou­ples out there that are rais­ing babies that are much older than us. But there was a rea­son why Hubby & I started try­ing to con­ceive within a year of mar­riage: I had always seen me as a younger mother; one that wanted to fin­ish hav­ing babies before the age of 30. There was a spe­cific rea­son behind that: my mother and I are exactly 3o years apart in age (sorry Mom!). Grow­ing up (par­tic­u­larly in high school), not only did I deal with a cul­tural bar­rier, but I also dealt with a huge gen­er­a­tional gap. Both my par­ents were pre–baby boomer, while I was most def­i­nitely a Gen-​​Xer. Even though after I turned 30, I knew that this was some­thing beyond my con­trol, adopt­ing now — espe­cially as the rules and regs of adop­tion have got­ten more strict — well, it no longer seems pru­dent for both Hubby & my sake.
  • Energy: Along with age, this is the sec­ond biggest con­cern that I have. And, if I was hon­est with myself, the flim­si­est bar­rier of all. Because, really this has to do with energy and sta­mina. It’s one thing to raise a child with the thought in mind that you’ll be young enough to (some­what) keep up with their needs. It’s quite another thing know­ing that I can no longer wake myself up in the morn­ing with­out hit­ting the snooze but­ton a dozen times. Would I be able to care for another life if I can barely care for my own? Like I said, flimsy … but I’m just being honest.

I don’t bring up these points to be neg­a­tive in any way, shape or form. I’m sim­ply stat­ing facts that appear to be the most obvi­ous bar­ri­ers for our indi­vid­ual case when it comes to adopt­ing a child. And that’s assum­ing that we would ever go down that route. And, as I said above, I’d love to hear your thoughts on what I per­ceive as barriers.

*****

As it is, I feel that we’ve already played our game of Infer­til­ity Roulette. We’ve already placed all the bets we wanted to at this time in our lives. And we lost that bet. With adop­tion (or h*ll, even if we ever decided to go through IVF again), I want some­thing I can be sure of … some­thing I can count on.

I hes­i­tate using the word “guar­an­tee” … since noth­ing in life is ever guar­an­teed, but after more than ten years of fight­ing the odds and now fac­ing even greater odds against us (age, finances, etc), Hubby & I opted to get out of the bet­ting pool.

And this is why, at least in my eyes, it’s never as sim­ple to “just adopt.” It’s never easy to go through another round of IVF.

This is why Hubby & I have decided to “cut our loss” … or in this case, “cut the strings” … and live child-​​free after infertility.

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Related Links:

Cut­ting The Strings

Infer­til­ity Bets On Hold, Part 1

Thoughts on Adoption

Infor­ma­tion on Fil­ipino Adoptions

Wiki Info on the Pre-​​Baby Boom Generation

Wiki Info on Gen­er­a­tion X

ADdressing Infertility

Recently, the New York Times wrote an arti­cle about a new real­ity series that TLC began air­ing strictly on their web­site. “A Con­cep­tion Story,” a Web-​​only show fol­lows the lives of 6 women as they try to con­ceive over the next seven months. Which, see­ing that this is the same net­work that airs “A Wed­ding Story” and “A Baby Story,” makes per­fect sense.

Meet Kris­ten, one of the six women in “A Con­cep­tion Story”

I mean really … what bet­ter way to bridge the “gap” between the Wed­ding Plan­ning and the arrival of a new­born baby by film­ing a show about Fam­ily Planning?

No. Really … I’m not being sar­cas­tic. Even though at first I was hes­i­tant to watch the show, I must admit that curios­ity got the best of me. While it’s cur­rently just wrapped up it’s sec­ond month of video entries, I’m actu­ally invested in watch­ing these six women’s stories.

For those that were as skep­ti­cal (or per­haps jaded?) about watch­ing ecsta­tic BFP (“big fat pos­i­tive” … as in a pos­i­tive preg­nancy test) announce­ments via the web, I’ll spare you the heartache to let you know, as of today, there has been only one per­son who saw the two pink lines thus far. And it’s a cou­ple that had been been try­ing to con­ceive for close to three years.

Which is another thing. Out of the six cou­ples we’re ini­tially intro­duced to, half of them have been expe­ri­enc­ing dif­fi­culty try­ing to con­ceive. The oth­ers that are just “start­ing” their quest to have a baby (or add another one to their fam­ily); well, it would appear that they, too, may be find­ing out that get­ting preg­nant isn’t quite as easy as the rest of the world makes it seem to be. Or as easy as the prover­bial “birds and bees” the­ory that we were taught in school.

Speak­ing of the birds and the bees …

About two weeks ago, I stum­bled on another arti­cle in an Austin** news­pa­per. It’s this arti­cle that led me to this web­site and the humor­ous, but spot-​​on videos about a Bird and a Bee deal­ing with infer­til­ity. If you haven’t watched them, I urge you to do so, if only to empathize with what any infer­tile cou­ple can encounter.

Both “A Con­cep­tion Story” and the “Increase Your Chances” vignettes  (also spot­lighted in this arti­cle in Salon, an award-​​winning online news and enter­tain­ment Web site) are prob­a­bly one of the first real adver­tise­ments high­light­ing the dif­fi­cul­ties in try­ing to conceive.

The Bird and the Bee

And when I say “adver­tise­ments” in rela­tion­ship to the TLC story, I do mean adver­tise­ment. Because although the sto­ries being told in “A Con­cep­tion Story” are in “real time” (as evi­denced by the jour­nals that these women write for the show), the whole she-​​bang is spon­sored by First Response, whose prod­ucts focus on all aspects of preg­nancy plan­ning. And it’s quite evi­dent the moment you click on the TLC web­site for the show, that they’ve invested a lot of money into adver­tis­ing their products.

But get­ting back to these adver­tis­ing cam­paigns, it’s quite refresh­ing to know that there are com­pa­nies*** out there that are will­ing to go that in-​​depth with the emo­tional side of infer­til­ity. Because, face it: thus far, any adver­tise­ments for infer­til­ity I’ve heard were for Infer­til­ity Clin­ics or Hos­pi­tal Net­works. And it’s typ­i­cally only a 30– to 60-​​second spot.

Yeah; that’ll never be enough time to go into depth about the mul­ti­ple lay­ers of Infertility.

As happy as I am about Infer­til­ity get­ting its fair share of air time, it’s sad to see that other peo­ple still may not empathize with what an infer­tile cou­ple go through both phys­i­cally and emo­tion­ally. All you have to do is look at some of the com­ments made in regards to such arti­cles that brought these ads to the forefront.

One per­son commented:

Couldn’t it be that if you can’t get preg­nant on your own that it means that god didn’t want you to have kids?

[Duh. Don’t think that I haven’t already thought about that. And oh, by the way … I believe if we’re talk­ing about one G*d, I believe it’s com­mon respect to address him/​her for­mally; not with a lower case “g.” I’m just saying … ]

While another per­son wrote:

The best way to become a par­ent is to chose to have your chil­dren dur­ing your most fer­tile years, not when you are old.

[Hmm … maybe some of us did choose to become par­ents when we were sup­posed to be most fer­tile? And so what if we started later in life? What does it mat­ter to you?]

And yet another per­son stated the obvious:

If you can’t have babies, why not just adopt?

[Because clearly adopt­ing a child is such a sim­ple task. And, unlike infer­til­ity treat­ments, there’s no finan­cial or emo­tional stress involved in the adop­tion process. NOT!]

But this one … for me, this one is the kicker of them all:

Infer­til­ity, espe­cially in devel­oped nations like the US, is prob­a­bly a good thing. I think it’s rep­re­hen­si­ble that big pharma and the med­ical com­mu­nity is encour­ag­ing peo­ple to have children.

That last state­ment is what prob­a­bly angered me the most. Even more than the “G*d didn’t mean for you to have kids” state­ment. To me, this state­ment has the poten­tial to dig deeper than the emo­tional tur­moil an infer­tile cou­ple can feel. As if feel­ing like fail­ure for not being able to repro­duce wasn’t bad enough … it is state­ments like that which can strip away any sense of sup­port that an Infer­tile can turn to out­side of the Adop­tion, Loss & Infer­til­ity (ALI) Community.

But that’s my own hum­ble opin­ion. Because really, when *I* look at both the “Increase Your Chances” adver­tise­ment and TLC’s “A Con­cep­tion Story” Web series, I don’t imme­di­ately think about run­ning to the first Infer­til­ity Spe­cial­ist I know. And I don’t make a mad dash to the drug store to pick up more Home Preg­nancy Tests.

No. The first thing I think of is that it’s about d*mn time that Infer­til­ity is get­ting its time in the spot­light. Just like Can­cer, Dia­betes, Coro­nary Artery Dis­ease … and pretty much every other health con­di­tion (Erec­tile Dys­func­tion any­one?) has.

Don’t you think this 24 & 25 yo new­ly­wed cou­ple deserved to have kids? We started try­ing about a year after our hon­ey­moon and kept try­ing for more than 10 years.

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**How much do you love me, Kate? :-P

***EMD Serono, a Massachusetts-​​based maker of fer­til­ity drugs, spon­sors the Increase Your Chances campaign)

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Related Links:

TLC’s “A Con­cep­tion Story”

NYTimes Arti­cle

Increase Your Chances Website

The States­man Arti­cle (Austin Newspaper)

Salon e-​​News & Enter­tain­ment Article

Admin Shtuff

Other Related Strings

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