"I Saw Your Profile": Meeting Our First Embryo Adoption Family

"I Saw Your Profile": Meeting Our First Embryo Adoption Family

"Never be afraid to trust an unknown future to a known God." — Corrie ten Boom

When I posted our donor profile in those Facebook groups, I honestly didn't know what to expect. I had already spent months with an agency that went nowhere. Part of me was bracing for more silence.

Then a message came.

The message

A woman I'll call Brynn had found my profile in an embryo adoption group. She reached out to me first. It was such a great feeling of excitement and anticipation reading her message. It was a long message with a bit about her family, her journey with infertility, and how she had grown her family to date. They desired to have one more pregnancy, and felt that embryo adoption made the most sense, given their fertility history.

I had prayed for a long time about where our embryos would go. I didn't want them sitting in a freezer forever. I also didn't want to hand them to a stranger and never think about it again. I wanted a family. I wanted someone who would love these babies the way we love our own kids.

Brynn had a strong sense of faith in her heart, and I immediately identified with her journey through hope and loss. She had been through the adoption process already via the foster system, which gave her a unique perspective on what it was like parenting children who were not biologically related to her. She also had given birth. Her family was a beautiful blend of love that she wanted to expand, and I could see our embryos fitting right in.

Getting to know each other

We started talking, and it didn't feel like a transaction. It felt like two moms figuring out if God was putting something together.

One of the first practical things we covered was whether the embryos were medically cleared to be donated. They were. That was a big relief, because it meant we could keep moving forward. Essentially her clinic needed to determine that the embryos were viable and graded at a high enough level to warrant adoption and transfer. Just like anything else, there is a unit of measure related to embryos that helps determine quality and likelihood for success. Several factors go into these measures such as how many days the embryos developed before they were frozen and how many cells they were made up of. Ours were great quality and had been tested and cleared of chromosomal abnormalities.

Then we talked about the part that mattered most to me: openness.

This was never going to be a closed arrangement for me. These children would be full genetic siblings to my own kids. I wanted them to be able to know each other. Brynn was open to that, and we even started tossing around ideas for family trips where the kids could meet someday. If there were children in the world who were siblings to my children, I wanted them to grow up knowing they were wanted and loved. That was why we were choosing this path. Love.

Holding it loosely

I'll be honest. Even with how good it felt, I knew we were only at the beginning. Matching is just the first step. There are still lawyers, clinics, contracts, and a lot of paperwork between "we'd love to" and an actual transfer, pregnancy, and birth.

I didn't know yet how many twists this road would take. I just knew that after all that waiting, someone had found us.

And that felt like an answer.

Next week

Next week, I'll share what happened when we started working through the real-world steps, and the first roadblock we hit.

"A man's heart deviseth his way: but the LORD directeth his steps." Proverbs 16:9 (KJV)