Embryo Adoption: When Life is Hard

We’ve missed an update or two lately, because life can be hard.

News

After a frozen embryo transfer, you wait.  We did that, but it was obvious to us that Rachael was pregnant.  Her body made that clear.  But the indications eased up and the pregnancy test came back negative.  And again a few days later.  At least one of the babies stuck for a short while, but all three have died.

People frequently wait to tell others about a pregnancy because of worries about miscarriage.  No one wants to have to tell everyone about the celebration of life and the pain of loss – and once you announce that you’re expecting, well, people develop expectations.  We decided years ago that we wouldn’t wait.  When we suffer loss and grieve, we won’t hide that behind closed doors.  Just as we celebrate life’s happy moments in public, we grieve in public too.  Welcome friends – share in our lives with us.

Joy

Joy differs from happiness.  We most certainly aren’t happy right now.  But in the midst of loss and sorrow, we have joy.  Joy that we have two boys at home who we have gotten to hold in our arms.  And joy to have adopted these three.  They have been part of our family for over two years, even if most of that time was spent “chilling out” (i.e. frozen).

In adopting a group of five frozen embryos, our primary goal was not to “grow our family”.  That was a happy byproduct of adopting them.  But what made us adopt was a chance to fill a need for some of the most vulnerable people in society.  Our primary goal was to give them the chance to live out their life, whatever that life would be.  We grieve their lives being so short, but rejoice that they had the chance to live out those lives as part of our family.  And we have hope to meet them some day.

This blog about our family business will continue to include entries about Embryo Adoption from time to time – we will always be an embryo adoptive family and Snugglebug is nearly two.  We certainly won’t stop advocating for this group of people who are so very vulnerable, particularly in “modern” societies.  We may be quiet on the subject for a time though, but we want it to be known we’re ALWAYS happy to talk about it, so feel free to leave questions.