Adoption vs. ART Part II

In re-reading my last post and thinking about it for a couple of days, I realized  that I have more to say about adoption and ART. First, adoption is still a viable option in my mind. Even with all the drawbacks I mentioned in my previous post, I am completely open to adoption. Also, when I said that it is lower on my list than it was 6 months ago, that doesn't mean it's at the bottom of the list. It's just that 6 months ago, it was at the top of my list of family building options if going au natural didn't work. Some of the reason it moved down this list is due to learning that adopting has drawbacks I didn't see before, but it also has to do with learning more about ART.

What I've learned about ART in the past 6 months is that there are many levels of assisted reproduction. Honestly, up until the past 6 to 9 months the only thing I knew about was IVF. I thought you either managed to get pregnant through BD or you had IVF done. I'd never heard of Clo.mid or IUI or Met.formin or anything else on the pre-IVF spectrum. So I thought that if I couldn't get pregnant on my own, my only choices would be to either spend $$$ on IVF with no guarantees (I knew that it doesn't work every cycle) or spend even more $$$ on adoption with a higher chance of ending up with a baby. (Very naive--I know.)

I also didn't know about the weird, middle road of infertility, where a couple is fertile enough to get pregnant, but not fertile enough to stay pregnant. Honestly, it is one of the most in-between scenarios I can imagine. It's really hard to know where you fit--almost too fertile to be an IFer, but not quite fertile enough to relate to most BLMs. Multiple miscarriages from spontaneous pregnancies seems to me to be the least represented form of infertility. At least, I haven't met many other people, on-line or IRL, who've had multiple miscarriages without also needing help getting pregnant in the first place. So that possibility didn't even occur to me before it happened.

Since my miscarriages, I have learned that there are several levels of ART that women go through before IVF becomes their best/only option. I've also learned that getting pregnant and staying pregnant are two different issues, with some treatments being different and others being the same or similar. For example: I've been diagnosed with polycystic ovaries caused by insulin resistance, but I still ovulate on my own and I don't have the most common outward markers of PCOS. Someone with PCOS might need more help getting pregnant, but she and I would probably both benefit from Met.formin. Another example is clotting disorders. They don't stop you from getting pregnant, but they can cause a host of complications once you are pregnant. However, no matter which complications they experience, women with the same clotting disorder usually have similar treatment regimens.

I've also learned about immunology, and the role it plays in fertility. Sometimes it seems to prevent conception entirely, other times, it causes the mother's body to reject all the babies she does manage to conceive. I'm still researching that area, but I'm becoming more and more convinced that it's worth finding out if my immune system is causing problems. I can't imagine how much I would kick myself if I had another preventable miscarriage, just because I didn't follow through and do the immunology testing before getting pregnant again.

So my ideas about what tests and treatments are worth my while have really changed. Knowledge has played a huge role in my attitude shift. I still consider adoption to be a viable option. If having a full term pregnancy turns out to be very traumatic for me, or if I end up having a condition that leaves me with very few options for being able to carry to term, I would absolutely consider adoption. At this point in my life, I would rather adopt than live child free (though I think that is a valid option for those who choose it, as well). However, since I have learned that there are ways of treating infertility that are less invasive than IVF, and since I still want to know what it is like to be pregnant and give birth, I've mentally moved adoption down from it's former place as my second choice family building option, to somewhere in the middle of the scale. I'm still not sure I'd go as far as to do IUI or IVF. At this point, it doesn't quite make sense to me, since I've already conceived without assistance. But I am willing to take medication, even if it means giving up my dream of a homebirth, so I can at least have a chance at a biological child.

There is one more aspect to my change in perspective and my shift in values, and that is the emotional side of pregnancy loss. But I'll save that for another post--this one is long enough.