Happy homecoming anniversary, Fernando!

(photos forthcoming)

A year ago, we had our fourth and last embryo transfer.  First transfer of two blastocysts on the 11th anniversary of daddy and I meeting, resulted in a week-long pregnancy followed by a chemical loss.  Second transfer of two blastocysts, about four months later, resulted in a "BFN" - big fat negative (pregnancy test). Third transfer of two blastocysts from a second batch resulted in our miracle 3 year old daughter, your genetic sister Maya. And our last transfer was also planned for two blastocysts, but only one survived the thaw.  That last little embryo was you Fernandito!

Just like with your sister three years earlier, daddy had to wait across the hall while I went in for transfer.  My bladder was bursting and I was certain that I would pee on the doctor, for which I wouldn't have felt bad since he made me drink twice the recommended amount of water and then had me wait on the transfer bed.  I walked on the wild side this time, and secretly took a photo of myself just before transfer.  (What'd you think I was going to say?  I videotaped the transfer?  I wish! Our first two transfers were videotaped, but alas that's irrelevant to you, I guess.)  Luckily this time I wasn't made to lay there for 30 minutes, so I was up and with daddy and Maya in no time.

We had made the whole trip into a family vacation.  We visited my brother and his family, Alex's grandpa and some cousins, aunts and uncles, and we managed a quick day trip to the beach the day before transfer.  I squeezed in an acupuncture session on the morning of the transfer, just in case it would help.  It certainly helped me relax and put me in the right frame of mind, if nothing else.

As we were leaving the hospital after transfer, we had someone take a lovely photo of us - first photo of us as a family of four!  I knew that no matter what, this was the last time I was undergoing any sort of fertility treatment, and all that was left was to find out what the good Lord had in mind for the future of our family.

I'm not sure what to think of the embryo that didn't get transferred.  All of the other embryos we "adopted" were in my body for however brief a moment in time.  I sort of thought of them as little angel companions for each other, especially for my Maya.  But Fernando, you were in there all alone.  So silly how the mind can weave crazy stories out of nothing.

Your batch of four embryos, I called the Franciscans, after the newly elected Pope Francis.  Maya's companion embryo I named Raquelita after my late best friend, Rachel.  We called Maya "Dee or Dino", alternating months during the pregnancy, since we weren't finding out her sex until after birth.  Your would-be companion embryo I named Francis.  We found out you were a boy in mid-pregnancy, at which point we started to think of names.  We had decided not to name you the boy names we had prepared three years earlier when expecting Maya. You were not some fantasy but a real boy, our son, and everything had to be reset.  Until then, you were a "Franciscan" ;)

I'm going to go ahead and put it out there, though I went back and forth about it.... I started to suspect right after your transfer that you may receive a calling to the priesthood.  (Since we're Catholic, this also meant that I suspected you were a boy!)  You see, after your sister was born and we moved to a new state, I became distant in my faith for a long time.  I had all but given up being able to recapture that sense of spirituality going into your embryo transfer.  Literally within days, I felt something spiritual.  I cannot explain what it was, because it wasn't anything concrete.  I just felt God's presence, I guess.  For the first time in years, I felt hope that I may one day truly "be Catholic" again.

I had a terrible first trimester as far as nausea and prenatal depression.  It was so bad that I had to request prescription medication, because the ginger root tea that finally helped when I was pregnant with Maya only made things worse this time!  I was thinking all sorts of nonesense about my lack of worth and I dreaded the idea of being responsible for two small children. I tried to sleep most of the time to avoid facing these thoughts.  But two Sundays in a row, before and after we moved into the house where you were born, the nausea and depression let up, to the point that I felt well enough to pack and move some of our stuff the first time it happened, and to unpack and put some things away the second time it happened.

Because these were Sundays, I again thought this was a sign of a possible religious vocation for you.  Whether or not the Lord calls you to the priesthood or not, He clearly called you to help bring me back to the faith!  I went on a spiritual retreat while pregnant with you, which helped tremendously in edging me in the right direction (namely, towards God).  As I write this, I am in my third week of spiritual direction, and I have started to call Jesus my friend.

In one of your sonograms, you resemble your sister Maya.  It is most uncanny, the lip and chin area in particular.  With Maya, I didn't think she looked anything like her sonos, but with you, wow!  I hope that you and Maya will be very close friends and are able to find comfort in each other's shared journey as donor conceived adoptees.  I have been working on locating your genetic family, in case you or Maya ever want more information about your genetic roots.  The Lord even put in my life a lady at our church who loves doing geneology and who has been working on your genetic family tree for many months.  I was also able to get a little more information from the clinic where your and Maya's embryos were stored, which has been a great joy to me, and I'm hoping it can help us locate your and Maya's three older genetic siblings, if not your donors as well.

So Fernando, thank you for showing me that just when I thought my heart couldn't possibly grow to accomodate loving another child as much as I love Maya, you proved me wrong!  My heart has been cloned, and each of you have their own mommy-heart in my chest.  I don't know how else to describe it.  I love you, and I'm so very happy that you're here and we're all together as a family now!

Leaving Online Groups

Weighing the pros and cons of membership of an online group.  I recently chose not to rejoin a group that was very educational in terms of race relations and adoptee perspectives, because of the uneven playing field, for which I don't fault the administration at all.  I just feel like my continued presence was having a toxic effect on me.  I am a bit too literal and can't always decode the appropriate context, and when I hear something is offensive to someone, I run with it, even if it means risking destroying long-standing relationships.  The privileged voices in this group were volunteers, so they didn't need to consider my intention or give me the benefit of the doubt.  But in real life, I should extend those courtesies to others.  And since I don't like to maintain a double standard, the way I am in one arena is the way I want to be in all of them, which was proving quite troublesome in my personal life.

So I opted to find other groups that deal equally well in terms of racial issues, but also covers issues of disability, sexism, and LGBTQ concerns much more so than the other group did (though they did occasionally come up).  I find that even though the group rules sound pretty much the same as those of the group I left, I have not come across anyone telling someone else to sit on their hands and be quiet, no name-calling, no "you should Google before you speak" (as if we know what we don't know until someone points it out to us).  So I'm very happy with these other race-issues groups, and decided I didn't need to put up with being made to feel like the disenfranchised groups just to prove a point.

I'm one of those people who doesn't need to visit the Holocaust museum to understand the gravity of what happened.  It doesn't take much for me to see the light, because I do always assume I have room to grow and don't know everything.  It pisses me off when people treat me like "just another white girl", and whatever stereotypes that conveys for them.

That said, there is another group that I am now thinking I may want to reconsider.  The opposite problem is happening there.  It's a group for those involved with embryo donation, but it is entirely from the perspective of the recipient parents.  Rainbows and unicorns, as was the saying in the race group I left.  I've brought up serious issues to try to get people to consider the perspective of their children, and I've been dismissed as being too negative and in a recent thread, there was actually an onslaught of people who came to comment specifically - it seems - in an effort to minimize the importance of what I said, ignoring it altogether. And yes, I see the irony of my problem with this group versus my problem with the other group I left.

I have to wonder what's the point of my staying in this group.  It's a lot of oohing and ahhing and prayers and baby dust for those still trying, sharing pictures and merchandise ad nauseum of anything snowflake related, and really no education seems to be allowed.  I don't need support, I'm done "trying" - and I feel that way even as I sit here in my "two-week wait", 7dp5dt.  I don't need people's condolences over the embryo that didn't survive the thaw.  I don't need people praying to Santa-Genie-God to show favor on me.  It's nice to share the specifics of where I'm at during this cycle, but this cycle is just about over with, and I don't see any long-term advantages to continued membership in this group.

It's a shame, too.  I really want to mingle with other EA parents, but I see they have got to be similarly-minded, too.  As in, they have to want to parent by taking the child's perspective into consideration.  They cannot be of the mind-frame that as the parents, their word is law, that they know better, that the child is to be seen and not heard.

Belonging and Identity

My daughter was born to me.  I did not adopt her.  I have to get it out of my head that embryo donation is just an early prenatal adoption, the way I was taught to believe by my pro-life Christian online forum acquaintances.  This attitude helped me get over my desire to not go against any Catholic church teaching, which forbids donor conception but welcomes adoption, and which recognizes personhood from the moment of conception.  For my own sanity, I was able to pursue embryo donation and still feel completely aligned with my faith.  

But now that I no longer have a need to be in line with that - or any other - organized religion, I'm also free to look at the circumstances of our family formation without trying to spin it a certain way.

There was no legal adoption that took place.  My daughter never knew any other relatives, any other human beings, until she began to grow and develop in my womb.  Absolutely all of her experiences and memories have been shaped by me and Alex and the people we have introduced her to.  Her donors were in no way coerced to give her up, as is the case sadly in many adoptions.  Her conception was no accident.  It was very well planned and thoughtfully carried out.  She was dearly wanted from the beginning. (That is not to say that this doesn't apply to adoptees, only that the circumstances of their birth tend to have an element of bad timing.)

I look at artificial reproductive technology as a sort of pre-mixing of cake.  You get all the necessary ingredients together, and then if need be, you put the mix in the fridge until you are ready to put it in the oven.  And perhaps you premixed more than you could reasonably eat, maybe because you are concerned about messing up the recipe and having to dump one or two failed attempts, so you allow for a margin of error. So after one or two cakes have come out of the oven, you realize you still have the makings of another cake left that would be a shame to get rid of.  So you donate it, let someone else bake it in their oven and enjoy it as if they made it from scratch.  Obviously people are not cake, but I hope the metaphor makes sense.  

Now I know that any pro-lifers who agree with the Catholic stace of personhood beginning at conception won't be able to get past this comparison.  How can I talk about tiny little people as dispensable, experiments, donations?  That's where we differ.  I do not believe that Maya was already a person before her embryo implanted in my uterus.  I believe that all the ingredients for her physical body were there, but that she only became animated once implantation took place.  It was my blood, my flesh, the environment that I provided for her during pregnancy, that molded the raw ingredients provided by her donors into the unique individual that she became.  And she is not done becoming, either - none of us are!  We all continue to change and evolve according to the experiences of our lives, never arriving at who we think we are.  What we really are, deep down, is not limited to our physical incarnation, our earthly life.  But that's another story.

So, while I do think we have an obligation to honor her Filipino heritage, I do not think that we need to do this to the exclusion of her Polish and Salvadoran heritage.  These last two are the cultures that she was born into.  She wasn't born into a Filipino culture.  

Alex and I recently took a DNA test to see what our ethnic heritage is made up of.  Alex has a large portion of his heritage (about half) indigenous Central American.  In other words, he is half Native American, according to his genes.  He was not born into a Native American family or culture.  He was born into a Salvadoran culture.  Similarly with me.  I long suspected that I have some Roma heritage, and it seems that there is about an eight of my heritage that originates in South Asia, which likely means I was right.  But I was not born into a Romani family or culture.  I was born into a Polish culture.  

What's more, we both changed dominant cultures when our parents brought us to the United States.  Now our dominant culture is American.  So too with Maya.  My Roma blood, Alex's Native American blood, and Maya's Filipino blood all contribute to our physical appearance.  I have the least amount of non-white genes, and so you really have to know what you're looking for to see it in me.  Only my very white relatives have ever noticed my light olive complexion, dark brown hair, and light brown eyes as being possibly of an origin other than Polish.  And while I feel intrigued by this link, and as much as Alex would like to claim his Native American heritage, what really defines us is our American culture.

Now I know that there are two points to consider here, and I've only talked about personal identity so far.  Based on my experience and Alex's, I am making the assumption that Maya will view her Filipino heritage similarly.  She may not, but then again, my parents never anticipated the difficulties I would have with my identity when we immigrated to the US.  

The other point to consider though is how mainstream society perceives us.  People assume I'm Anglo-American, or at least "just white" with solid roots in American genealogy.  They do not see a Polish immigrant.  Alex was once assigned the boxes of "white Hispanic" without being consulted. Are we treated differently?  It is really impossible to compare my experiences with those of Alex.  

First of all, I am female; he is male.  Second of all, we have very different personalities.  I've struggled with my identity while Alex hasn't.  If Maya takes after her dad, which we have reason to believe that she just might, she'll take on a carefree attitude as well.  If she takes after me, the brooding type, then no matter what we do, she will analyze every little thing to the detriment of much progress!  

Bottom line, I think I'd be doing her a disservice by fixating entirely on her Filipino heritage, to the exclusion of her Polish and Salvadoran heritage.  If identity is formed in large part through culture, and culture is passed down through language and experiences and values, then she has more claim to Polish and Salvadoran - and American - culture than she does to Filipino culture.  But identity is still determined to a degree based on genetics, and that's why we can't simply ignore her Filipino heritage. Only as she grows will she be able to reflect on her own identity and determine which aspect(s) of her background are the most salient for her.  

Does Alex have a claim to his Native American heritage even though he wasn't brought up in that culture?  I think so.  But I think so in large part because it's a significant part of his genetics, and it affects his physical features and thus how he is perceived by others.  Do I have a claim to my supposed Roma heritage?  I doubt it.  Probably because the percentage is something like 12% or less, and it doesn't have a significant affect on my physical features or how people perceive me.  

What I find interesting about Alex's heritage and identity is this.  As a Latino, he is by definition multiracial.  His ancestors include Native Americans and white Spaniards.  If he had been born in the United States, with North American Native American heritage rather than Central American, he would not be considered "Latino" even if his white ancestors were Spanish speaking Spaniards.  Yet because he has the added layer of immigrating to the United States, within the US, his multiracial identity is replaced with the label of "Latino".  

Similarly, had my family emigrated to a different European country instead of across the Atlantic, I wouldn't be considered "white" as my primary identity, but Polish.  Our differences - mine and those of the people of our host country - would be highlighted over our commonality, opposite to what happened to me in the US.

Maya, had she been born into her donor family, would be a multiracial American, just like she is after having been born into our family.  She would be perceived the same by society - multiracial.  People may guess as to her heritage - Latina?  Part-Chinese? Some other mysterious and exotic combination? And she may very well get these questions from Filipinos and non-Filipinos alike, because she is multiracial.  Granted, Filipinos as a whole are made up of various racial admixtures, some looking more white, others more Chinese, others somewhat Latino or indigenous.  

To treat her genetic heritage the same as if she had been adopted from, say, a Chinese family, or even a Chinese-white family, by two white American parents, is to ignore the additional layer of identity that is created by the facts of her donor conception and subsequent birth into a different yet still multiracial and multicultural (and multilingual) family.

In the end, the best thing I can do for Maya in helping her form a sound identity is to educate myself not so much on transracial adoption, which doesn't technically apply to us, but on parenting multiracial children as a whole. Her being born into our family isn't what makes her multiracial.  That was a given from the circumstances of her conception.  What being part of our family does is allows for a more nuanced consideration of what it means to belong, to a culture, race, ethnicity, nationality.  

Who decides on the labels used? Who decides what percentage of one's heritage is sufficient to lay claims to that identity?  Who decides which type of heritage - genetic or cultural - is paramount? Who else if not the individual herself?

We Should Be Coming Out of the EA Closet Soon

I've been struggling with the discussion of embryo donation/adoption lately.  Before our daughter was born, I was very open about our journey and what avenues we were considering in our pursuit to parenthood.  But now that she's here, it's her story too, and I'm afraid of giving too much away without her consent.

I know too many ignorant people who do not censor their thoughts before they speak.  Case in point.  Last night we were getting our check at a restaurant when the waitress, looking at Maya, asked, "Who does she look like?"  Awkward pause... "She doesn't look like either of you!"

Hmm, I chickened out and took the chance to focus on my daughter not spilling her drink so that I wouldn't have to address the waitress.  Alex, luckily, responded with a vague truth that seemed to satisfy our rude inquirer, "She's got a little mix in her."

Apparently, as Maya gets older, she is growing more into her Filipino looks.  To be honest, we both assumed that we could bank on her being mistaken for Hispanic and therefore, since Alex is Latino, not have to face these sort of questions.  We've been getting comments about her beauty since the beginning, and I've had two different men ask me - when Alex wasn't with us - if she were "mine".  Alex generally sailed by on their daddy-and-me escapades, until just this month.

Apparently, he recently got his first comment questioning where Maya gets her looks from.  There was a guess that I - his wife - may be Chinese.  He got the exact same comment from someone else just the day before the restaurant situation.  So if even he's getting these comments now, we have to be proactively prepared to respond in a way that lets our daughter know 1) that she absolutely belongs in our family regardless of resemblance, and 2) what an appropriate response to such a nosy question would be if she ever gets asked something like this directly.

The other piece of the puzzle is that we do want to celebrate her British and Filipino ancestry.  We want her to be proud of it, though to be honest, I don't know what that means.  What does it mean to be proud of a group that you belong to?  To be proud of the accomplishments of those who share your DNA?  Your ethnicity?  Your cultural history?  Why is that something to be proud of?  I'm not saying it's not, I'm just wondering what makes this phenomenon relevant in a person's life.

Regardless, we can no longer ignore that Maya's ethnicity is not Polish-Latina.  Don't get me wrong - she absolutely still is Polish, by virtue of having a Polish mother who speaks Polish to her, and she absolutely still is Latina, by virtue of having a Latino father who speaks Spanish to her.  Furthermore, she is American - that which unites the three of us.  But to think that this last identity would take precedence over race, ethnicity, or culture is a bit naive.

Several months ago, Alex and I agreed that if the topic of conversation naturally presented an opportunity to share Maya's unique beginnings, we would matter-of-factly share.  I had the chance to do just that with a new friend whose husband is Filipino.  It made more sense for me to share this information with her than to go out of my way to hide it, since I was asking all sorts of questions about Filipino culture!

But there are other friends, both old and new, who don't yet know.  Not because we're hiding it, but because we don't think of how she came to be in our family anymore. I don't want anyone to ever question how "real" our relationships to each other are.  I don't know what I would do if someone said something like "does she know her 'real' parents".  Would I cry?  Would I curse?  Would I start yelling or even lash out with a backhanded slap to the back of the accuser's head?  I honestly don't think I could just calmly correct the person.

Quick aside.  I was recently asked if I "just stay home" with my daughter.  I tried to make light of the phrasing.  As in, yeah, I don't really do anything much.  But it didn't catch on and the person asked if I did anything before having Maya.  I took the bait and responded that I taught ESL, and the moment was gone after that.  But the implication was heavy and is still with me, though I don't think what I do is easy at all (hence the word "just").

Based on my lack of a witty yet polite reaction to the "just staying home" conversation, or the "she doesn't look like either of you" exchange, I can't say that I would know what the best way to respond would be to a "real parent/own child" interaction.

I think the best defense is offense, as counter intuitive as that may sound.  I should probably test the waters one person at a time, until I am very comfortable sharing just enough but not too much information, so that I am prepared for the inevitable stranger comments and questions.

By the way, here's what I've come up with regarding any future comments about our family's resemblance to each other:

1. Yeah, I don't look like my mom either.
2. Really?  You don't think?  Everyone else says she's a spitting image of her dad!
3. No, she looks like herself.
4. I know, aren't genetics a fascinating phenomenon?
5.Well, she's all ours!  I gave birth to her myself, naturally at home, even.
6. Why do you ask?  What makes you say that?

Adoption, Donor Conception, Both, or Neither? (Part 3)

In summary, here is how our daughter's embryo donation conception differs and is similar to both traditional adoption and gamete donation conception.

How our daughter's embryo donation conception differs from gamete donation conception: 
1. The embryo donor conceived offspring does not share genes with either of her/his parents.
2. The nature of the embryo donor conceived offspring's conception is not marred by material gain or purposeful creation into a subpar situation.
3. The embryo donor conceived offspring has one group of genetic relatives - both donors and siblings - that if found, are found in one fell swoop.

How our daughter's embryo donation conception differs from traditional adoption:

1. There was no legal proceeding to form a familial bond between us and our daughter.  Likewise, there is no involvement of social services judging us worthy - or not - or suggesting how we ought to parent.

2. Our daughter has never bonded with any of her genetic relatives.  She was born to the woman who carried her and who is parenting her.  There was never any separation or loss of current relationship. 

3. Due to my current spiritual views, my daughter didn't come into existence until her pre-embryo implanted in my uterus.  It was my body that nourished her into life; she is quite literally made of my own flesh and blood.

That said, there are also similarities with both.

How our daughter's embryo donation conception is similar to traditional adoption:

1. She does not share DNA with us.

2. She was conceived in love by a married couple who agonized over their decision to place their remaining pre-embryos with a different family.  (Yes, I realize many birth/first parents are not married and some adoptees were sadly not conceived in love.)

3. She has a limited, manageable number of genetic relatives which she may or may not be able to locate and develop a relationship with.

How our daughter's embryo donation conception is similar to gamete donation conception:

1. She has genetic relatives "out there" that she may or may not be able to find and develop a relationship with.

2. She was born into our family.  She can easily keep her donor conception private if she so chooses because I was pregnant with her and still nurse her.  She also resembles my husband physically.  

3. She was conceived with the help of artificial reproductive technology.

Why does it matter if I consider our daughter's situation that of adoption or donor conception?  Going into embryo donation, the distinction was important to me because the Catholic church taught against any form of artificial reproductive technology and embryo donation was a sort of loop hole that I was able to accept while maintaining my religiosity.  

Now that I am no longer religious, both options are neutral to me.  So the main thing is just figuring out whose voices I need to be listening to in order to understand what my daughter needs from me regarding this unique aspect of her identity.  After looking over these comparison points, I see that it is not as simple as simply "choosing a camp" - adoption or donor conception.  Our daughter has things in common with people from both camps.  And until there is a sizable enough group of adult embryo donation conceived individuals, this is as good as it's going to get.

Adoption, Donor Conception, Both, or Neither? (Part 2)

In part one of this two-part series, I talked about how our daughter's conception via donor embryo is not quite like adoption, the way I had originally believed when first pursuing this alternative to parenthood.  Here, I cover how it's not exactly the same as sperm- or ova-donation conception either.

The first and most obvious difference is that most donor conceived individuals still share half of their genetics with one of their parents.  (Except, of course, for those families who were built via "double donor", meaning sperm donor and egg donor, neither of whom know each other or the intended recipient parents (at least not in anonymous donation). But that actually presents a still further complication when it comes to ethics, so I'll leave it alone here.)  In embryo donation, the child born to the parents shares neither of their genetics.  This is precisely why the first part of this mini-series dealt with a comparison with adoption.  Adopted individuals likewise don't share either of their adoptive parents' genetics (again, except for step-parent or kinship adoption... seems like there's always an exception to everything, isn't there?)

This lack of any genetic linkage can be good or bad, depending on ones' perspective.  From the intended parent's perspective, I couldn't imagine mixing my own DNA with that of any man other than my husband.  On some level, it felt as though I would've had a child "with" this other man, putting my husband in a sort of step-parent role.  I know not everyone sees it that way, but I do, and that's why we didn't pursue single-gamete (sperm) donation.

From the child's perspective, I did consider that it may be better to at least grow up with half of your genetic relatives rather than with none.  Yet the gulf that the resulting implication (discussed above) would have left in my husband's and my relationship would've surely had a negative impact on our child.  Furthermore, the difference of knowing some genetic relatives versus none at all may have had an unbalanced effect on the child's relationship with the genetic versus non-genetic parent.  By utilizing embryo donation, the playing field was balanced out.

Another difference between embryo donation and gamete donation - at least the kind we utilized - is that my daughter was not specifically conceived with the intent of growing up not knowing some of her genetic relatives.  She was not conceived specifically so that she would grow up in a "less than ideal" situation.  These are perspectives I'm reading from donor-conceived adults, which is how I know these are things they think about.  This process of being created on-demand, as it were, makes them feel manufactured, like a commodity.  It affects the entire sense of self worth for some.  And while there are "embryo donation" programs that are essentially double donor programs that are started before the intended parents come onto the scene, the "traditional" embryo donation is a lot more straightforward.

Our daughter's donors are a married couple who faced secondary infertility.  They turned to IVF and surrogacy to complete their family.  After three years, they decided they weren't going to transfer the remaining embryos created with their family-completion IVF in mind.  It took three years for them to place the embryos into the embryo donation program, which tells me that they must have agonized over the decision.  They didn't choose to destroy them or donate them to science, which tells me they either believed the human life present in their pre-embryos deserved a chance to fulfill their potential, or they wanted to give another family struggling with infertility a chance to grow their family, or both.  This is very different from a gamete donor providing their DNA in exchange for money.  This sort of information gets internalized by the donor conceived offspring.  How their donors came to the decision to donate effects how the offspring feel about their conception, and by extension, their self-worth.

Finally, most donor conceived offspring have many, many genetic half-siblings "out there", which creates a need for a lifetime of searching (for those curious about their genetic relatives and whose donors were anonymous).  The real risk of inadvertently meeting and marrying a genetic half-sibling grows with the more "popular" donors and/or less regulated/ethical sperm banks.  (Due to the nature of egg donation, there generally can't be more than a handful of genetic half-siblings due to egg donation.)  In embryo donation, on the one hand, all siblings are full genetic siblings, but on the other hand, there are only a very limited number of them.  If the donors had a large number of pre-embryos they donated, these may have gone to several different recipient families.  Otherwise, all pre-embryos were donated to the same recipient family, and the only genetic siblings the donor-conceived offspring has "out there" are the children of their own donors.  If they find one of them they find them both.

To sum up, embryo donation - where "left over" pre-embryos from the donor family's own IVF treatment go to a recipient family - differs from gamete (sperm or egg) donation in these three ways:

1. The embryo donor conceived offspring does not share genes with either of her/his parents.
2. The nature of the embryo donor conceived offspring's conception is not marred by material gain or purposeful creation into a subpar situation.
3. The embryo donor conceived offspring has one group of genetic relatives - both donors and siblings - that if found, are found in one fell swoop.

From what I read, donor conceived offspring's most common concerns are the ethics surrounding their creation and the sheer volume of possible genetic half-siblings, neither of which applies to my daughter.  The first difference - that she doesn't share genetics with either of us - is why I considered if her situation was more like traditional adoption.  Yet based on my reading of concerns adult adoptees often have, I don't expect her to share a lot of those concerns.

So where does that leave us?  Only she can decide for herself as she matures with which group(s) she chooses to identify, if either.  Until then, I will need to continue to listen to both adult adoptees and donor conceived adults and take to heart the issues they describe and consider if and to what degree they may affect my daughter.

Adoption, Donor Conception, Both, or Neither? (Part 1)

When we first got our infertility diagnosis, we proceeded straight to trying to adopt.  We pursued private domestic infant adoption, international adoption, adoption from foster care.... all with false starts and dashed dreams and money down the drain, but also with valuable lessons learned.  Five years after first learning of our fertility challenge, our daughter entered our lives.

We had slowly made our way from open adoption to closed adoption back to open adoption with our first donor embryo match.  Two transfers and four embryos later, we were still childless, and I was ready to embrace anonymity once again.  Coming from a strong, Catholic-inspired pro-life stance, I fully believed that the tiny embryos awaiting "adoption" were already humans.  This belief helped me reason why it was morally acceptable for me to "adopt" them even though my then-strong Catholic faith taught that anything related to artificial reproductive technologies was wrong.  I even posted here about how our EA FETs were not IVF.  So desperately I tried to fit into my faith community while still pursuing our dream of parenting a child. 

But then I got pregnant with our daughter.  And then I gave birth to her, at home.  And since then I've nursed her at my breast for over a year and a half now. Recently, I joined a transracial adoption group to try to continue my education in the area of raising a confident, well-adjusted child whose ethnicity I didn't share.  In the process, I've come to see that I actually didn't adopt my daughter.  

There was no legal adoption proceeding, no homestudy, no social worker visits, no one granting us permission to take her into our home and hearts.  No one told us where she must sleep, what she should be fed, or who is allowed to care for her when Alex or I are unavailable.  These are all issues that adoptive parents face as they are entrusted with someone else's child, and often social workers follow arbitrary guidelines as to what is appropriate and safe for a child.  

I wouldn't have been able to cosleep with my daughter had she been adopted.  Not openly, anyway.  I may not have been allowed to breastfeed her either, even if I had been able to induce lactation. Perhaps after finalization of the adoption, I would've been allowed to finally choose who can babysit her, and I'm sure homeschooling wouldn't have been an issue by the time she was old enough to start academics.  But had she been older coming to us, or had her adoption gotten delayed for some reason, these are not decisions I would've been able to make based on my mother instinct of what's good for her.  Rather, I'd constantly be second guessing myself, wondering if this or that decision could be used against me to have my daughter removed from my home.

Another reason I no longer believe that our daughter was adopted is that she simply doesn't share the same often deeply painful losses that many adoptees have.  The woman who carried her for 8 months, with whom she bonded, whose heartbeat and voice she was intimately familiar with by the time she was born - that woman was none other than me!  She was never separated from someone who was once her entire world.  She never has to deal with being rejected by her genetic family.  Her name was never changed.  Her birth certificate was never falsified or sealed. And there was probably little chance of a genetic relative being taking it upon herself to keep any resulting children in the original family by transferring the pre-embryos herself. She does still have the loss of that genetic family, to be sure.  But it is not compounded by implications of rejection. 

  

A third reason I now don't believe I am an adoptive mom is based on an evolution of my spiritual beliefs.  In pursuing embryo donation and undergoing three frozen embryo transfers, I was deeply interested in the early development of human beings, starting from fertilization onward.  And through this research, I concluded that while human "life" begins at fertilization, human "personhood" doesn't start until implantation. Here's why.

A blastocyst, which is what an egg fertilized 5-6 days earlier is called as its cells divide, is capable of two fascinating feats prior to implantation.  The first is that it can split into two separate blastocysts which then implant separately, growing and being born as identical twins.  One embryo --> two human beings.  Likewise, two ova that are both fertilized at about the same time can proceed to divide and develop into two blastocysts who somehow merge together into a single blastocyst just prior to implantation.  The result is a singleton baby born with two sets of DNA, also known as a chimera.  So two embryos --> one human being.  (Note that we are not talking about two embryos where one simply stops growing, or twins where one simply dies and the other continues towards birth.  We're talking about the physical, genetic merging of two sets of DNA into a single human body.)  

Because of these two phenomenon that occur in nature, I was forced to conclude that human personhood does not begin immediately upon conception, but rather once these two phenomenon have had a chance to take place.  Therefore, once a blastocyst is implanted in the uterine wall, it becomes known as an embryo, and only then does it become a unique human being, one that only needs time and a continuous supply of a healthy environment of the womb in order to grow into a fetus and then a newborn, toddler, preschooler, etc.  The same cannot be said of a zygote or morula or blastocyst (earlier stages of human development).  (See here for my post mentioning how problematic it is to use the term "embryo" for earlier stages of development."

I mentioned that my understanding of human personhood was based on a spiritual outlook.  So far I've only established the science leading up to my point.  Once an embryo is implanted, it is then that I believe God begins to work on that specific individual, forming her or him in their mother's womb. (I'm going to ignore surrogacy here for simplicity's sake, as it comes with its own set of complex considerations.)

The Biblical verses I used to refer to when thinking about how "life begins at conception" are actually more nuanced now.  Psalm 139:13, for instance, states: "For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother's womb."  Until I learned about chimeras and was reminded of identical twins, I took it for granted that God's job began immediately, with sperm in one divine hand and ovum in the other.  But now I see that while I don't deny God's ongoing role in all of creation at all of its stages, it does not mean that the moment God put his hands together with the necessary gametes, a new person was created.  Rather, it is a process, much like baking, if you will.  And there is a preparation phase that, if interrupted, does not result in a fully baked cake, no matter how much time you give it and even if all the necessary ingredients were there.  You still have to mix, measure, pour, and finally put in a functioning oven.  Then and only then does the timer begin and you can say that you have a cake baking in the oven.

At any rate, adoption is nothing like this process.  Adoption takes place once a fully formed human being is born into a family that for one reason or another does not end up raising that baby.  Adoption leaves nothing to the imagination - a baby is born in one family, but another family takes the child home with them.  It is an artificial way to build a family (by which I don't mean "negative", just that it's not what was intended originally).  Which brings me to another perspective I see often missing from potential adoptive parent discourse.  

Adoption is often framed as a "loving option" or a way to "start" or "grow" your family.  The audience for this discourse is of course the potentially adoptive parent.  It's their family that is being grown through adoption.  The child's family is actually being taken away first, before being replaced by the adoptive family.  The child's first mother's family is likewise being taken away - period - and not being replaced with anything. The goal of pro-adoption terminology is to normalize adoption so that infertile parents can feel comfortable in their role as a "real" parent.  

I remember the discussion of "real" versus some other qualifier before the words "parent" and "child".  Mostly it's adoptive parents who are defensive about having someone imply that they are not a "real" parent.  Many don't like the idea of saying "adopted child" or "adoptive parent" because they feel it takes away from the parent-child relationship.  I was one of these potential adoptive parents.  Yet these same people often don't have a problem demoting the first mother to "birth mother", "bmom", or worst of all, the acronym "BM" (which if it isn't clear is also an acronym for "bowel movement", something most awful to associate any human being with, much less the woman who gave birth to one's adopted child!)

The adoption industry is biased in favor of where the money is.  Sorry, but that's the truth, a truth I already started to realize even as I still hoped to benefit from it.  It is the adopting parents - not the first parents or children - who fund the adoption industry's profit, and so it shouldn't come as a surprise that what potential adoptive parents hear from adoption agencies is precisely meant to be music to their ears, anything to help them feel good about the idea of adopting. 

You may question that potential adoptive parents actually need encouragement in this decision. Perhaps you associate adoptive parents with infertile couples whose only hope of a family is through adoption.  I was often also ignorant of the fact that there is a whole other family-building industry out there that provides an alternative to adoption and is often preferable to adopting: artificial reproductive technology, including donor conception and surrogacy.

To sum up, embryo donation differs from traditional adoption in these ways:
1. There was no legal proceeding to form a familial bond between us and our daughter.  Likewise, there is no involvement of social services judging us worthy - or not - or suggesting how we ought to parent.
2. Our daughter has never bonded with any of her genetic relatives.  She was born to the woman who carried her and who is parenting her.  There was never any separation or loss of current relationship. 
3. Due to my current spiritual views, my daughter didn't come into existence until her pre-embryo implanted in my uterus.  It was my body that nourished her into life; she is quite literally made of my own flesh and blood.  

It may sound as though I am implying through this post's discussion of adoption that I consider my daughter to have been "donor-conceived".  However, it is actually not as simple as that, either.  In my next post, I'll discuss how embryo donation carries different considerations from sperm- or egg-donation.

What's an Embryo and is it a Person?

I don't think "pre-embryos" are people for the same reason I don't think cake mix is the same as cake. There's all the ingredients, there's potential, but the fact that you still need a proper environment to develop, and that you can freeze embryos but not people (and expect them to survive), means there's a distinct difference between the seed and the seedling.

It needs to actually be clarified that fertility circles misuse the term embryo. Truth be told, I actually do believe real embryos are the tiniest beginning of people. But only when embryo is used correctly to refer to post implantation. Pre implantation, we have a fertilized egg, a morula, finally a blastocyst, depending on number of times cell division has taken place. Mere cell division doesn't turn a fertilized egg into a baby. For that, you need the womb. Only when planted in the lush uterine wall of a woman does a seed stand the chance to grow into a seedling.

Furthermore, the fact that before implantation, a blastocyst can split into two separate blastocysts, possibly resulting in the implantation of both and resulting in identical twins, this should tell us personhood doesn't begin until we are certain only one individual will result. Not only that, but two blasts can also fuse into one, forming a person known as a chamera, or an individual with two sets of DNA. This should prove that a singular unique DNA doesn't equal an individual, as is commonly thought.

This has little implication for the pro-life movement when it comes to abortion, since many women don't seek abortion until they miss their period, which means implantation has already taken place and - according to the above reasoning - there is a tiny baby at stake.  

But this reasoning does have implications for contraception-as-an-abortificant that is cited as one reason against contraception by the Catholic church.  Birth control pills can indeed prevent a fertilized egg from implanting, but if we were to accept implantation as the point of personhood, this should have no bearing. 

This reasoning also has implications for in-vitro fertilization.  Many people who complete their fertility treatment and are left with pre-embryos they do not plan on transferring in hopes of another baby are faced with a dilemma, at least those who believe that life begins at conception.  They don't want to keep the pre-embryos for themselves, either by transferring them or paying storage indefinitely.  But they don't want to destroy them or donate them to science either, since this would be synonymous with murder for those who believe a fertilized egg is a human person.  The third alternative is to allow the pre-embryos to be "adopted" into another family who will transfer them and hope to grow and raise their own baby. Sounds like the perfect solution, right?

Yes and no.  See, while pre-embryos are in the pre-implantation stage, it's one thing.  But once they are implanted and develop into a true embryo and later fetus, there is no going back - there won't be two out of one or one out of two.  However many implantations took place, that's how many babies are growing. And if those babies have DNA from a family other than the one they are being born into and raised by, then issues of identity and medical history and general access to the child's genetic relatives and ethnic heritage become issues.  These are not things that can easily be figured out after the fact, and yet many people don't think about the potential future child's sense of self when choosing fertility treatment options.  I'm not saying third party reproduction should or shouldn't happen.  I'm saying that when it does, the potential child's best interest needs to be paramount, both from the perspective of the donors (that they be willing to be known, at least when child turns 18), and from the parents (that they be open with child about their background and willing to support contact with genetic family).  

I don't expect us to all come to an agreement on when human personhood begins any time soon.  People make rationalizations for killing each other at all stages of growth and development, way past the in-the-womb stage, so there will always be those who simply don't care about the experiences of the in-utero fetus.

A side note, I used to cringe at the term "fetus", as I thought it belittled the humanity of the unborn baby. But I realize now that it's merely a stage of development, just like newborn, infant, toddler.... Interestingly, when I was at a store with my newborn daughter, a teenage girl approached us and with a squealing voice announced, "what a little fetus!"  I was horrified, but in retrospect I see that she clearly wasn't saying that my daughter wasn't a human being!  She was saying that she was so small she could easily still fit in the womb, which was true, as she was born weighing less than 6 pounds!

Maybe two babies, maybe none

(This is the fourth installment in our detailed journey.  Start here, or go to Part 2 or Part 3)

The two babies that might have been.

Before we met Becky, we began to consider other options to parenthood.  We still didn’t want to dole out $20,000 for an agency to match us (which is essentially what they do, by counseling the birth parents and weeding out those not committed to an adoption plan).  Through my online contacts, we decided to try to adopt through our foster care system.  We weren’t necessarily set on a newborn.  In fact, I kind of dreaded the idea of constant nightly cries.  And foster care had the cheap factor going for it.  So we began taking classes and we underwent a new homestudy.  

We were licensed as foster parents in July, the same month that the match with Becky fell through.  We waited patiently, so I thought, for two months before I got antsy.  I found out that we didn’t have to limit ourselves to our own county for fostering, and that a neighboring county was in need of foster parents.  It sounded too good to be true.  We went to their orientation and filled out paperwork requesting that they transfer our license.

One week later, we got a call from our own county regarding the possibility of a foster placement.  (Coincidence?  I think not.) We were actually given two choices.  One was a sibling set of a one year-old sister and 6 month old brother, whose parents were expected to lose their parental rights.  The other was a 6 month old Latina whose fate was uncertain.  None of the previous children we were matched with before had ever been Hispanic, and this was one of my #1 priorities at the time.  Even though it was a risk, I felt that again this was a sign, and we opted to foster VV.

It was a long weekend, waiting to hear back from the social worker to see if another family, also given this same choice, had picked “our” VV.  Maybe I didn’t think fostering all the way through.  I was concerned about having two kids at once, even though they were likely to be available for adoption soon.  I just wanted a baby in my home.  I didn’t think about the future, or the fact that this baby may not stay with us.

We picked up our little cherub from an emergency foster care placement where she had been for about a week.  The first thing we did was drive by my parents’ house to show her off.  It was as if she was ours from the first moment we saw her.  Then we brought her home and basked in the glory of a baby in the home.

Our first weekend with VV. Alex is holding her up as she explores sand!

Social worker visits and case meetings ensued.  We met VV’s parents and paternal grandmother at the first meeting.  Mom was 16, dad was 20.  They had been married for 2 years.  The reason VV was removed sounded like a big misunderstanding to our ears.  Miscommunication followed by a vindictive phone call. So we braced ourselves for a nice little babysitting gig and nothing more.  But VV would end up staying with us for 10 months.

We thought we had completely moved on to another phase of our journey when we started fostering in September, so it came as a total surprise when I got an email from my brother’s girlfriend in mid-December of 2009.  She was pregnant, and they wanted us to adopt the baby.  Has there ever been a bigger sign?  Why else would all the other leads fall through if not so that we could adopt our own nephew?  It was the perfect match!

I confirmed with my brother about their intentions, and we arranged to meet to discuss their reasons and their options.  In trying to guard my heart, I suggested that Alex and I could be the little guy’s legal guardians while they figured out how to handle the situation.  But they were adamant that adoption was the way to go.  In fact, she gave me a boppy pillow as a gift.  We went to prenatal yoga together.   Our nephew was due to be born in April.  

My mom I think got the most unique announcement to a firstborn grandchild.  My brother and I met with her at her house.  We sat her down on the sofa, and I proceeded to give her a present, a newborn dress (ultrasounds suspected a girl) with the tag saying “dla Babci” ("for Grandmother").  As my mom looked at the dress to try to figure out what was going on, I proceeded to tell her that it looked like Alex and I were finally going to be parents…. that we were adopting a baby, and that the baby’s father was my brother.  I think this arrangement was meant to smooth over the announcement that my brother was unexpectedly expecting a baby with the joyous news of our long-awaited parenthood.

In February, we met with our attorney to have an adoption plan drawn up for the hospital.  We’ve never gotten this far before with a lead!  This was it! Except that it wasn’t.  A week after we spent $800 on attorney fees, I got a text message from my brother saying that his girlfriend had changed her mind.  No apology, no further explanation.  I was crushed.  

I couldn’t just forget about this birthmother like I did the others.  This baby was going to be in my family no matter what.  He would always be a reminder of our crushed hope, or so I thought.  My faith journey had brought me to Christ by now, and though I was still weak in it, I’m sure it helped me through.   In fact, when my brother left for boot camp and my parents moved, Alex and I took our newborn nephew and his mother into our home.  

I'm welcoming home baby Andrew.

She had been living with my parents for a year, but my parents were downsizing and she wasn’t able to join my brother until he graduated boot camp.  We were in the hospital for our nephew Andrew’s birth, along with our foster daughter.  That whole time in my life seems like a blur.  I wonder how I could’ve survived the intense emotions of welcoming a nephew while at the same time trying to shake the loss of a son. 

Just a couple of months earlier, Alex and I met with an adoption counselor to discuss some of my conflicting emotions.  At that meeting, I remember hearing the counselor rephrase my concerns like this: “On one hand, you may be adopting two children – your nephew and your foster daughter.  That’s so exciting!  On the other hand, since neither is a guarantee, you could lose both children.”  I remember hearing this and dismissing it.  There’s no way God would allow us to lose both children.  One or the other, if not both, but we will be parents this year!  

Perhaps God orchestrated the heartaches in such a way that they would manage to bounce tiny bits of joy off each other.   From April to July, we had two children in our home, neither of them ours.  But we heard the pitter-patter of little feet and we smelled the sweet scent of an infant.  I babysat Andrew only reluctantly during those months.  It was very hard for me to make sense of our relationship.  Having lost hope of being his mother, how could I settle for being just an aunt?  It wouldn’t be until a year later that I finally fell in love with my nephew for who he is.

Over the months, it began to be more and more clear that VV was going to be reunited with one of her parents.  At first, we thought it’d be with her dad.  He was very active in meeting with us, visiting with her, while her mom made no such effort.  But then there started to be resistance from him and his mother when it came time to show proof of child-friendly living arrangements, sufficient income, and the like.  For a moment, we thought VV’s goal may be changed to adoption (by us, who else?), since mom showed no interest and dad was resistant, while neither grandmother was available or willing to do what needed to be done to get VV back.  But then mom began to get more and more involved.

Once we saw that mom was making a solid effort, jumping through all the hoops to regain custody of her daughter, in spite of our own desire to parent her daughter, we knew we had to make the transition back as easy as possible for everyone involved, especially VV, who was 16 months old when she left our home.

(Part Five to be continued...)

Two Other Birth Mothers

(This is part three of our detailed journey.  Start here, or go to part two.)

I mentioned that while we were on again, off again with Isaiah, we went through two other fall-throughs.  The first was with a birthmother named Kaylee (name changed), who contacted us via our Parent Profiles account.  I remember reading her initial email over and over again at work, where I first got it, trying to read into it to sense her true intentions and the meant-to-beness of this match.  After a few more emails back and forth, I spoke with Kaylee on the phone and once we learned a bit more about each other, we arranged to meet.  She lived locally, only about a 45 minute drive from us.  We agreed to meet in a fast food joint near her home.  We arrived, scoped out the place to see if we might catch a glimpse of her before she sees us (we did not), and we settled in to wait for her to arrive.  After about a half hour, we tried calling but didn’t get a hold of her.  We got stood up. 

But she wrote to apologize and asked for another attempt.  She couldn’t make it the first time due to family drama (of course).  She was a young teenage wife, already with an 8-month-old, and sounded like her husband may have been abusive. We were understanding.  We agreed to meet again after the holidays, in January (of 2009).  We went to visit Mount Vernon as we waited for this next meeting.  Everything about what we’ve talked about indicated that she was definitely interested in placing her son with us, that she was definitely not a scammer, and that we were several weeks away from being parents.  I remember standing in line at Mount Vernon thinking about my son-to-be, and being so excited about the prospect.

For some reason, I couldn’t get to sleep the night before we were meant to meet up.  I logged onto my email account to find an email from Kaylee .  Not only was she cancelling our meeting, but she was backing out of the adoption plan.  As it turned out, over Christmas she found out that her aunt and uncle were interested in adopting her baby boy, due the following month.  Of course, we were all for children staying with their original families whenever possible.  We are happy for the little boy, but sad for us.  

A few months later came another “sign”.  My friend Melissa told me about a lady she knew who was looking for adoptive parents for her unborn grandbaby.  I remember the moment Melissa told me about Becky (name changed).  I was at her house and we were watching a YouTube video of Gianna Jessen, a woman who survived her own abortion.  It took me a minute to realize that Melissa was giving us a lead.  I took the information, went home and contacted the grandmother (note to self:  grandparents have no legal rights to their grandchildren).  The very next day, I was on my way to meet the birthmother at her grandmother’s workplace.  

Becky and her sister were finishing high school while living with their grandparents.  You guessed it – drama at home lead to this living arrangement.  Becky was only a couple of months along, but she was happy to meet with me.  I took her to the food court at the mall, and we chatted over lunch.  During our conversation, Alex called.  He didn’t know we had another lead.  I told him where I was, and I remember what I said: “I’m having lunch with a young lady considering placing her baby for adoption with us.”

We proceeded to spend a lot of time together over the next three months.  She came to our house, went to work with me, we went out to eat, and took her and her sister sightseeing in DC.  At one point, we got to talking about names.  She wanted to know if we had thought of names, and we shared what we were thinking of.  She didn’t like the names.  Then she shared her ideas, and we didn’t like those.  It was an odd conversation, because parents name their kids… if she wasn’t trying to parent her baby, why was she thinking of names? 

I made contact with the baby’s father, who was also on board with the adoption.  We never worried about someone else adopting their baby due to the unique circumstances of the baby’s conception.  Becky’s mother had a baby she placed for adoption before Becky was born.  We actually thought this was a good sign that Becky had first-hand experience already with adoption.  But wait, there’s more.  After Becky and the baby’s father “hooked up”, it turned out that Becky’s new boyfriend was the very long-lost brother placed for adoption many years earlier.  Many people worry about babies conceived through incest, but we never really worried about it.  The chance of birth defects only goes up something like 1 or 2%, which we thought was not significant enough to pass on this lead.

At any rate, the whole family seemed to be on board with the adoption. On one occasion, Becky’s sister mentioned what she thought the baby might look like, except that she made a point to say to us “your baby”, not “her baby” or “the baby”.  We thought, great, so the sisters are talking about this, and she sounds like she’s not attaching too much to the baby.  

Let me stop right there.  I was actually happy to hear that this baby’s mother was not attaching to him.  This is the sort of mentality that develops when you try to adopt.  It is so easy for it to become about you and your needs, and not the best interest of the child.  The best thing that could’ve happened to that baby was that his mother figured out a way to make things work and keep him.  And that’s exactly what happened the moment she turned 18.  She moved back to her mother’s in Florida, and we found this out through her status updates on Facebook.   When I contacted her to see what was going on, she matter-of-fact said that she decided to parent.

I stayed Facebook friends with her for another year, during which time she had another baby, apparently to keep her sister company during her sister’s pregnancy.  In retrospect, I was relieved to have dodged the bullet of an open adoption with the drama in that family.  Little did I know that there was drama coming to my very own family as well.

(Part Four to be continued...)