Adoption with IVF...Who knew?

This is tough to hold onto when you are in the middle of it all. There are so many ups and downs. You go through a test and you hold your breath to find out the result. You have to make so many life decisions. We spent an hour in the little back room of our fertility clinic trying to sign paperwork that says what we will do with the leftover embryos if both of us die. These are decisions, I am convinced, that no one is ever equipped to make. Believing that God is the creator of life, and believing that those little embryos, if given a chance to grow, would become human beings, there was no possible way I could sign anything that could give them to science or let them die in a lab. We discovered after talking with our doctor that this is what all of his patients have done. I suppose in one’s own mind you can make the case that they are not little humans, but to me, and I realize this is just me, they are. God holds the keys to life, and if blessed with the opportunity, who am I to say they should not be born. This is the major medical dilemma for Christians going through IVF. And while I will never condemn those that feel differently, I could not do it even if it meant donating them to another couple. This is a scary thought too. If we donated them it would be just like an adoption. We would have a biological child somewhere in the world that we did not know, that could even exist after we are both gone. These strange science fiction type thoughts are real to us now. Would the other parents love our children? Could they afford them? Would they have a good life? We could never know these things. I thought of how I would feel if I could not conceive my own child but was giving the opportunity to carry one. What a gift that could be to someone. I thought of how this would only be a small glimpse of what a birth mother would feel if they were put into position of loving their child so much to give them an opportunity. I can’t imagine the love that comes from adoption. When we told our doctor this is what we chose, to not destroy any of our left over embryo’s, that we would donate them to give them a chance at life even if we could not have them ourselves, he told us we were the only couple in his past 15 years of experience that chose this option. I was amazed and a little sad at that fact.