Hey Baby

February 17, 2025 2:54 AM

Looking for resources about childbirth, IVF, and adoption that you personally found helpful or enlightening

I'm with a partner who I suspect I will have children with. We're both older, so the timeline for having kids is going to be relatively short and I need to make some fertility decisions very soon. I have always been on the fence between having biological kids and adopting. However, I haven't really needed to think about it too much until now, and I realize there is a lot I don't know. I would really like to be as informed as possible before making the first major decision this year. Also - without going into too much detail, any adoptions would be transnational so that the children would be the same ethnicity as my partner.

Please recommend me your best resources for the pros, cons, legal requirements, ethics, timelines, processes for egg freezing, transnational adoption, IVF, childbirth, etc.

posted by Penguin48 to Grab Bag (6 answers total)

It has been about 12 years and I no longer read it revularly, so things may have changed dramatically, but r/adoption was incredibly helpful for me. In my early days of considering adopting, I got some REAL rough love there. Over a couple years of reading it prior to adopting, I learned so much from listening to adult adoptees and listening to first mothers. No part of my educating myself about adoption was more important than listening to the first person words of adult adoptees and first mothers (and in some cases fathers, but the bulk of my learning came from first mothers and I am a mother so that perspective was particularly helpful to me). Their words were often harsh, and as a parent who is considering adopting they often made me angry and I had to learn to sit with that. I do believe that the time I spent sitting with that, listening, and learning, made me a better person and a better adoptive mom. I wish there was a name for the relationship that I have with my son's first mom, but we have become close. I can't really point you to any individual blogs or books from adult adoptees or first parents, but I found virtually all of the ones that I read through r/adoption. If you ever want to talk to an adoptive parent about adoption, ethics, open adoption, talking to kids about their own adoption, etc., I am happy to talk but also more of your info on these topic should come from adult adoptees and first parents than from adoptive parents.
posted by fennario at 5:19 AM on February 17 [4 favorites]

Resolve, The National Infertility Association's website is a good starting point. Happy to discuss the IVF experience over email if you need further info on that.
posted by icaicaer at 5:27 AM on February 17 [1 favorite]

If you're interested in stories where IVF didn't work, I found this Slate article interesting.
posted by fiercekitten at 8:07 AM on February 17

I am an adult closed-record adoptee, in reunion with one of my biological parents. I am also one of the people who has provided the aforementioned “tough love” on r/adoption, although I don’t go there much anymore and I don’t actually recommend it for research because, well, it’s Reddit, and you never know exactly who it is that’s talking or what their actual motivation is behind what they’re saying.

If you are considering adoption, you may want to start with listening to adult adoptees about what the experience of growing up this way is actually like.

You could start with this series called We The Experts, where adoptees talk about the adoption experience on a variety of topics: https://programs.adoptionmosaic.com/wte-recordings

I would also highly recommend listening to the podcast “Adoptees On,” particularly, in my opinion, any of the episodes labeled “The Healing Series.” https://www.adopteeson.com/episodes
posted by terridrawsstuff at 9:05 AM on February 17 [2 favorites]

My relatively uninformed opinion is, that most of those options can take an unpredictably long time, such that if you're serious about having children (even if you don't mind the how), you would be best off pursuing them simultaneously.

E.g. Transnational adoption - the logistics will depend on where you are now, and where you're adopting from, and I know neither of those, except that a several year timeline where you jump through hoops and whatever checks are needed in your country, is reasonable.

Being aware of what would make you a better adoptive parent, will mostly help you with whatever type of parent you end up being, as adoption can sometimes very much be parenting on a harder mode.
To the extent, that I know several people who hadn't really seriously considered being parents, or been around kids, and kind of blithely assumed they could adopt instead if they wanted too.
Which is slightly insane to my way of thinking, because it's better for the adopted child if you have spent *more* time thinking about children and parenting, that you are at least somewhat confident in being an *above average* parent, in order to navigate the challenges of adoption - it's the harder mode, not the fallback.

And if your partner has fixed enough ideas about parenting that they would want an adopted child who looks like them, then that might be the first flag that they'd be better as the easier mode, bio parent, or really need to think about what parenting is for them - whether it's about themselves and what the child looks like compared to them, or what it would mean to be child focused, and entirely focused on being
good parents for the adopted or bio child they want to have.

IVF or egg freezing, again, prices in your area and wait list /waiting time will vary. If you're under 35 and have the spare money to freeze eggs, then start that process.

If you're thinking of having your own biological children, then the assumption with IVF is that you've already tried to get pregnant for about a year and failed (not to mention, you'd be throwing money away to skip right to IVF).
Things you'd do in either case might be, taking a prenatal supplement instead of a multivite (Thornes prenatal seemed good). Both parents might want to get genetic testing then chuck the raw data into https://promethease.com/ as that is essentially the cheapest way to check for a lot of the potential genetic combinations etc.

I had my child just before I turned 41, oddly despite a history of extremely irregular periods (from PCOS), it went really smoothly, in terms of conception, pregnancy, birth. I'm now wondering if I have the energy for two kids as a single parent, which I'm on the fence about, but hey it's going well enough that it's not a straight up 'no' at least.
posted by Elysum at 9:39 PM on February 17 [1 favorite]

then the assumption with IVF is that you've already tried to get pregnant for about a year and failed (not to mention, you'd be throwing money away to skip right to IVF).

6 months if you're over 35. Start discussing fertility right away with your doctor.

The best resources I found were real-life/in person people who have been through this on one or other (or both) of these ends, so seconding the suggestions to talk with transnational adoptees, adoptees, birth parents, etc. Also, see if you can find other people in your community who have been through fertility treatment. I'm queer and have a lot of queer parents around me, so that's mostly who I found to talk to, but I also found a lot of straight couples use fertility treatment for a variety of reasons from age to non-fertility related health to fertility issues. Starting those conversations can be delicate, so you'd probably want to approach it with an I'm interested because I'm exploring this and I'd would like to hear your perspective if you'd be willing to share.

I also found Baby Making for Everyone by Ray Rachlin and Marea Goodman and Queer Conception by Kristin Liam Kali helpful book. And if you do use IVF, The Trying Game by Amy Klein was also helpful.
posted by carrioncomfort at 6:04 AM on February 18 [1 favorite]