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Difficult Decisions
Adoption After Infertility
By Laura Lyster-Mensh
"Don't rush yourself," Eisman says.
RESOLVE's Clapp likes to advise infertile couples to take the time to "examine the option they are not considering." By exploring child-free living first, Clapp believes a couple can identify fears and reservations before moving on without regret.
Evans, who has always felt she "was intended to adopt," says the process of adopting "has been so wonderful so far compared to the infertility road."
Choosing adoption involves many layers of involvement with other people: social workers, agencies, the legal system and often a gauntlet of people from another country and culture – all of whom will put potential parents under the microscope. That process can be invasive, but can also invite an introspection and deliberation that enriches the experience of parenthood.
Doctors treating patients for infertility are not always comfortable bringing up adoption. "Patients that come to me for infertility treatment get the impression we are saying their treatment won't be successful" if adoption is discussed, says one fertility expert, who declined to be interviewed for this story.
Elizabeth Bartholet, author of Family Bonds: Adoption, Infertility and the New World of Child Production (Beacon Press, 1999), thinks the opportunity to adopt need not be a last resort or a final door. She argues against treating potential parents as a problem that can only be treated medically.
"My own sense is that doctors, by training and profession, are a biased source of information," says Bartholet, an adoptive parent herself. "Infertile people need better information earlier in the process about the range of options ... They need to focus on the most important issue: becoming a parent."
*Names have been changed to protect privacy.
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