The Myth

In August of 2010, I was infertile and childless, waiting for a call that didn't seem to be coming any time soon. Judge Royce C. Lamberth, whose parental status I don't know, was, at that time, issuing a ruling that President Obama couldn't single-handedly overturn congressional laws regarding federal funding of embryonic stem cell research. I was reading about it on the internet, in an article much like this one: http://chronicle.com/article/Federal-Judge-Overturns-Oba/124106/ I don't actually remember the article, or the news provider, and I honestly don't remember the articles "take" on the subject, if there was one.

Because I was moderately depressed anyway, and unable to tear myself away from the train wreck of opinions, I spent quite a bit of time reading the comments under the article. It contained the usual hate speech regarding presidents both past and present (but mostly past), protests regarding international conflicts, and a lot of wrath aimed at pro-life activists. There was, as always comes up when embryos are mentioned, a veritable stream of animosity aimed at people who can't have children, but pursue getting help in doing so anyway, since, of course, they should just accept their childless state as nature's way of phasing their obviously defective genes off of an overpopulated planet. 

And then, in the middle of all of that, there was this comment, edited because I don't remember the exact comment and had no wish to save it:

"The right-wing religious nuts want us to believe the myth that there are embryos available for adoption, but their lie is halting the progress of science"

And here's the kicker: nobody contested it. I was flabbergasted.  I almost, and I do mean I came thisclose, signed up for whatever news site it was, ready to brave the stream of spam it would bring to my inbox, just to address the issue. I wish I had, even though the comment was roughly 12 pages back on a small article that nobody would be reading even 3 days later.

You see, the call I had been waiting for was for one of those "mythical" embryo adoptions. We had put in our application, and were just waiting to be contacted. I was in contact with families who had children born from adopted embryos. I had gone through paperwork, bloodwork, house inspections, and fingerprinting to qualify to adopt an embryo. I was praying that even now a family was looking at our profile, asking themselves if we were the right couple to give their babies a chance to continue life. This was no myth.

That terminology has haunted me all the way through this process. I was reminded of it today as I spent half an hour dangling my hair in my baby's face and listening to her shriek with laughter, and I thought- "I'm not making this up!" There were hundreds of angry people on that website wanting to dissect her little life cell by cell and perform experiments with her remains, but we wanted her for her own sake. So this blog is, in part, for the unbelievers out there, those who think that there are only two options for embryos in animated suspension: death via discarding, or death via research, and that the possibility of life with loving, biologically unrelated parents is a myth:

We're here.

Closing doors and expanding horizons

I learned the hard way about the "happily ever after" stuff. I mean, I never expected my marriage to be perfect, but I did expect life to go roughly as planned. Which it did, for about a year, and then we started trying for a baby. I had a miscarriage the day after my positive pregnancy test that first month. I never even told family or went to the doctor. But wait, at least now I knew I could get pregnant!

Never say that to a woman who's just lost her baby, by the way, because it might not even be true. It wasn't true for me. I've never conceived since. I wonder, now, if that pregnancy wasn't ectopic. I mean, I've never had my tubes looked at, but it makes sense for them to be scarred, given what I was eventually diagnosed with.

10 months later, I knew without a shadow of a doubt we had a problem. I know, I know, it takes 1 year of unprotected intercourse to be infertile, but I had no doubt whatsoever that we would get there. That guideline  applies to every couple, regardless of whether or not they know enough to time things correctly, and because we had been using the Fertility Awareness Method to chart my cycles since we got married, we knew when we could potentially conceive. Each perfectly timed cycle has between a 20-25% chance of resulting in a pregnancy in a couple of normal fertility. If you can do math, that's 4-5 cycles, 6 to stretch the chances out a bit.

Now, I don't say that to scare anyone. I personally know several women who had charted and timed intercourse and conceived on their 8th, 10, 13th months, for example. But I'm a little a lot scientifically oriented, and I knew we should be pregnant by now. I also knew my cycles weren't nice and textbook, and it looked like things were getting worse. So I started looking for help. I started supplementing with Maca root (which did help my cycles, by the way), futzing with the amount of light I let into my bedroom at night, drinking more water, and I scheduled an appointment to get some bloodwork done.

I also started researching what our options might be once we were actually classified as infertile, beyond the hope/despair/try harder cycle. A good friend of mine pointed me to an online forum for offering Christian support to infertile women, called Hannah's Prayer. There I found all I wanted to know and more, from women who had been through medical treatments, the adoption path, fostering, you name it.

It was there that I found a new thing. Something that had not been mentioned once in my years at a Christian University. It hadn't been mentioned in my nursing classes, nor in my ethics classes, nor in my philosophy classes,  no matter how much we covered conception, the beginning of human life, and the issues surrounding high-tech infertility treatments. Hannah's Prayer had a section dedicated to embryo adoption, and it seemed like I couldn't learn fast enough. What an obvious arrangement- why had I never heard of it before?