Motherhood through Embryo Adoption

Amy Houghtaling is a graduate of Fuller Theological Seminary and has spent most of her career working with people struggling with homelessness. She now holds the position that she believes will do more good in the world than any job she’s ever had:  she is a stay at home mom to her son and daughter, biological siblings adopted as embryos.  In this episode, she shares about the process she went through to adopt six embryos and attempt to give birth to each of them. She reflects on how she grew into her motherhood and developed a deep sense of connection to all six embryos through this challenging process. And she's offered to be in touch with anyone considering embryo adoption who would like to connect with her personally—you can do that by emailing femammalpodcast@gmail.com, and I will make sure your message reaches Amy.

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Transcript

[00:17] Greer: 
Hi, this is Greer, your host for Femammal, the podcast that holds space for women to explore what it means to live well in our bodies and celebrates moving through this world as female mammals. This season, we are listening to women share their stories of how they formed their families, especially when health factors or medical issues impacted their decisions. Women's health matters for its own sake. At the same time, for many women, health issues not only impact their own quality of life, but also their paths to forming families. And many women have wanted to share those stories here, too. For our purposes, forming families means the creation of any home life that generates safety, belonging, connection and joy. And it doesn't exclusively mean becoming a parent and raising children. I hope you will listen to each story this season with a sense of curiosity and compassion. And if you're going through something in your life right now where you're not in a place to listen to stories like these, I hope that you find compassion and support for what you're going through, and you can return to this podcast when you're ready. Today's guest is Amy Houghtaling. Amy is a graduate of Fuller Theological Seminary and has spent most of her career working with people struggling with homelessness. She now holds the position that she believes will do more good in the world than any job she's ever had: she is a stayathome mom to her son and daughter, biological siblings adopted as embryos. In this episode, she shares about the process she went through to adopt six embryos and attempt to give birth to each of them. She reflects on how she grew into her motherhood and developed a deep sense of connection to all six embryos through this challenging process. And she's offered to be in touch with anyone considering embryo adoption who would like to connect with her personally. You can do that by emailing femammalpodcast@gmail.com and I will make sure your message reaches Amy. Welcome, Amy. Thank you so much for joining us and sharing your story about embryo adoption. I think that's a way of bringing children into a family that a lot of people aren't very familiar with. So could you start by telling us a little bit about how and when you and your husband embarked on bringing children into your family and then how this idea of embryo adoption came up?

[03:25] Amy: 
So I have to start by saying my husband and I both got married later in life. It was our first marriage. I was 38 and he was 39, and we started trying to conceive immediately and were not able to conceive naturally, just the traditional way. And so we started fertility treatments pretty soon on in our marriage, I had an OB that was pretty, people would say maybe aggressive about that, but that was good. So I started fertility treatments, was going to attempt an IUI, but the fertility clinic I was working with got their paperwork mixed up.

[04:10] Greer: 
Sorry, could you tell me what IUI?

[04:13] Amy: 
I'm sorry. Yes. So an IUI is, I think it stands for intrauterine insemination. It is sort of the first step a lot of people take towards fertility treatments that's more than just taking medication or timed intercourse or something like that. So what it involves is a clinic monitors your cycle, and by blood tests and sonograms, can tell when you're going to ovulate. And they give you some meds to kind of beef up your ovulation. A lot of times, you might ovulate more than one egg, and they monitor that, and then they take some of your husband's sperm and put it in your uterus at just the right time. And it's like a concentrated amount. So it raises your odds of getting pregnant somewhat, but you have to do it at the right time. And the clinic I was working with at the time basically got their paperwork mixed up and didn't get my blood test in and missed my ovulation, which was very frustrating. And my whole story has a whole lot of human error involved in it. And that was the first big one. So we didn't even do an IUI. I changed doctors, and the next doctor we went to said, you're 39 years old, don't do an IUI, you need to go straight to IVF. And so we tried, like, two months later, we tried an IVF, and that also did not work. I believe a lot of, there's a lot of misunderstanding around all of this fertility thing, but one of the main, I think, myths we believe, is that anybody can get pregnant through IVF, and that is absolutely not true. The statistics I read recently were half of the women who try IVF, and most of them do multiple cycles, only half of them actually have a take home baby. The odds are not real great, and the odds go down considerably the older you are. It's a huge factor in being able to get pregnant through IVF and, period, at all.

[06:44] Greer: 
And I think folks are more familiar with IVF, but just in case not, it stands for in vitro fertilization.

[06:52] Amy: 
Yeah, in vitro fertilization literally means in glass, so fertilization in glass. So with in vitro fertilization, doctors monitor your cycle, and they can tell when you're ovulating. And they give you medicine so that you will produce more eggs than normal. But they monitor everything. You take hormones, which are shots, progesterone and some estrogen, and it causes, hopefully, women to produce, they shoot for about twelve eggs. And they can tell how many eggs you have because your ovaries will shoot out these little follicles. And they can see them in a sonogram. And they know if they see these little follicles, they know that there's probably an egg in there. There might not be, but that's where the eggs are, and that's how they know how to look for them. So at just the right time, when you have enough follicles and they're long enough, they go in and they will retrieve the eggs out of your ovaries. And then they put them in a petri dish and expose them to sperm. And the sperm, hopefully fertilizes the egg. Doesn't always, but hopefully it fertilizes the egg and then it creates an embryo. And hopefully the embryo grows and grows to about what they call a five day blastocyst, which is about 100, 200 cells. And then they will transfer, usually one into the mother's uterus. Now, in my case, which happens, sadly, with a lot of women who are older because I did not have a lot of eggs and a lot of this very specific hormone. It's called AMH, anti-mullerian hormone. I only had, like, two follicles when they were doing the sonograms, and it is not worth doing the surgery and doing all the work when you only have two follicles, because the chances are there's maybe one, two eggs, and those eggs might not even fertilize and they might not even grow. So technically, I did not do an IVF because we didn't get to that point. Our doctor said, this is not going to work. You need to cancel. Don't do the egg retrieval. And also in that conversation was, you will not have your own biological children. 

Greer: 
Wow. 

Amy: 
It wasn't like 100%, but it was IVF, no fertility treatment is going to work for you. It still happens. Sometimes these things happen, and women still can end up getting pregnant. But they did say, okay, you could do egg donation. Now, the way we came across embryo adoption, one of my really good friend's really good friend was talking to me about it just randomly in a conversation years before I got married in New Haven, Connecticut, on a New Year's Eve. I think it was 2011, and for some reason, I remembered that conversation. This woman was just really passionate about embryos. She really wanted to have kids through embryo donation, and she was engaged or married. I don't really remember where she was. I think she was married already. But interestingly, I've kept up with her, and she had one or two of her own genetic children and has proceeded to have a child through embryo adoption and attempted a few more pregnancies, and is currently pregnant with twins through embryo adoption. So she did this not because she could not have her own genetic children, but because she was just really passionate about embryos. I, on the other hand, I can't say that that was my story, but I did remember that conversation. And in our first consultation with a fertility clinic, one of our major concerns was we would hear these stories about couples doing IVF and ending up with all these embryos. I mean, like 13 embryos, and what are you going to do? You can't have 13 kids. And I was really concerned about what to do if I had extra embryos. And the particular reproductive endocrinologist, that's the fancy word for fertility doctor, said, you can either discard them, donate them to medical science, or donate them to an anonymous couple. And on the drive home from Valparaiso to South Bend, I remember telling my husband, if IVF doesn't work for us, I want to do, I want to be that couple that's getting these unused embryos. And I remembered, I just kind of knew in the back of my mind, that New Year's Eve conversation. I knew there was a way to do it, not anonymously. I don't know how I remembered that or how I gathered that from my friend, but I knew that there was another route. So a few months later, we tried the IVF, and then they told us, no more fertility treatments are going to work for you unless you want to do embryo donation or egg donation, which with egg donation, you use usually an anonymous egg donor. They do the IVF on her, they retrieve her eggs, and then her eggs are used, exposed to your husband's sperm, and you carry the baby. But it is not genetically your child, but it is your husband's child genetically. And a lot of people choose to go that route. We just didn't feel, I can't say we had any moral problems with it, but it just felt really strange. It felt really weird. We just wanted all our DNA, or none of our DNA. And a lot of people feel that way across the board, not just religious people, I mean, all kinds of people. It's just kind of how it feels for you. So we did not want to go that route. We wanted to do the embryo donation route. And our conversation when we canceled the IVF and it was the, we can't do anything more for you. You're not going to be able to have your own genetic children. The doctor said, well, we can do anonymous embryo donation. And I said, I think there's another way. I just said, if I were a child born from embryo adoption, I would want to know my story. I would just want to know. I want a scenario that my children can know, at least be able to meet their genetic parents when they're older or know the story behind how they were conceived. There's usually siblings out there. When you're donating embryos, you don't donate embryos unless you've already completed your family. And so if it's an anonymous donation, then you have full biological siblings that you don't even know exist. So I just didn't want an anonymous situation. So we moved forward. We decided to still try getting pregnant on our own for a little while. So we tried for, like a year more, something like that. And it was still. I mean, it wasn't impossible, so we tried and it did not work. So we started on the embryo adoption route maybe four months after our IVF was canceled. And we tried originally at the beginning, tried through an adoption agency, and they wanted us to be married for two years before we could even submit an application. And I was 40 and already knew I couldn't have my own biological children and was just ready to go. And they really wouldn't do anything with us until we were married for two years. There are also websites you can find embryo donors on, I call them dating websites for embryo adoption. So we looked around on that and we found people that were very interested in donating their embryos to us. But I was very determined to get at least six embryos, and that was because, not because I wanted to have six children, but because I knew the odds were not all of these embryos turn into babies. And I really wanted genetic siblings, which is one of the huge draws of embryo adoption, is it doesn't always work out, but there's a very good chance that not only do you give birth to these babies, but they are full blooded biological siblings. So I really wanted a really good chance at that, and I felt like I needed at least six embryos to have a good chance at that. So we weren't able to find anybody through the embryo dating websites who had six that they wanted to give to us. So we ended up, we were pretty close to two years of marriage anyway. So we ended up going through the adoption agency. And in the meantime, the other big question that my husband and I both really changed our minds on was, originally we did not want embryos that were created through egg or sperm donation. And half of the embryos that are donated, placed for adoption, whatever terms you want to use, that are out there are created through egg or sperm donation. So what that means is they create embryos using donor egg or donor sperm, and they have a lot of extras, and they donate them to another couple. Whereas what we were originally looking for was husband and a wife, both people in a relationship who created embryos together. And we would know the genetic father and the genetic mother. That's why we were, because we wanted to know the story. We wanted our children to be able to ask questions of both genetic parents. So originally, that was really what we were looking for. But I actually read an anecdote about a couple that had tried again and again to do IVF, and they hadn't been able to get pregnant with their own eggs and ended up using an egg donor. And it's kind of a bizarre thing of how I put these pieces together in my mind and my heart, but I was just like, oh, my gosh, I'm saying no to half the embryos out there. And they are probably the embryos that are most likely to turn into babies. And ultimately, what I really want is to have children. And I didn't make the decision to do that for those couples. Like, I wasn't the one that said, hey, you're not going to know who your genetic mother is. I didn't make that decision. The original couple made that decision. And the reality is adoption, even when it's embryo adoption, it's hard and it's complicated. And I decided I should be open to helping a child through that complicated conception story, that I wasn't going to be too afraid of, that I was going to be open to helping children deal with that. I have friends that have adopted out of foster care, that have adopted, had children placed with them through a birth mother, and they have far more complicated scenarios to explain to their children. And so I said, okay, I can take it upon myself to bear the burden of explaining donor egg or donor sperm conception. So I made a big shift with my thoughts towards that in the course of all of this. And we told our adoption agency, yes, we are open to donor sperm, donor egg. And so they said, great. And it was a rough journey, the first batch of embryos that we were matched with my fertility doctor worked on FDA paperwork for for six months. And in retrospect, it was paperwork that he really didn't even need to do. Like, it probably could have been done in two weeks. And then the day we were signing contracts, the embryologist I had been working with called me and said, do not touch these embryos with a ten foot pole. They are never going to turn into babies.

[19:00] Greer: 
Oh, wow. Okay. So I've got to pause and ask a couple of questions. 

Amy: 
Yes?

[19:04] Greer: 
What does the FDA have to do with any of this? 

Amy: 
The FDA is in charge of organ donation, like kidney donation, and they monitor that.

[19:18] Greer: 
Okay.

[19:19] Amy: 
And embryo donation is treated similarly in bureaucratic terms. So even though you can't, I really don't think it's possible to get AIDS from an embryo, you still have to get all their FDA paperwork that said they did all these STD tests that says they don't have AIDS, they don't have syphilis, they don't have whatever. It's really bizarre. And the other really bizarre thing is embryologists and fertility clinics all over the United States have all different opinions on which of these FDA rules really count towards embryos and which do not. And one embryologist I spoke to at one point, who's probably the most knowledgeable one I've ever spoken with, said, these do not apply. FDA rules do not apply to donor embryos. Like, in her interpretation of it, none of those rules should have applied. But in the interpretation of this fertility doctor I was working with, he was super strict.

[20:14] Greer: 
Okay. And so for you, that just wound up slowing down the process to the point that--

[20:19] Amy: 
Six months on embryos that were probably not viable and all this clinic would have had to do was read the dates on when the egg retrieval happened and when they were fertilized and when they were frozen, to know these are probably not viable. Like, if I knew what to look for in the paperwork, I could have figured this out. Nobody read the embryology report before telling me to take the embryos.

[20:48] Greer: 
Wow.

[20:49] Amy: 
It was a huge human error. Huge human error that cost me six months. And a lot of it's a lot like. I mean, emotionally, it's a lot like a miscarriage or being matched with a birth parent and then not actually being able to adopt the baby. Like, psychologically, that is what it's like. And this does not happen very often. I think the adoption agency probably could have done more, but really, that was the fertility doctor and the embryology lab's fault. The adoption agency is not a medical clinic. They didn't know, and they're not doctors, and they're not responsible. That's why I sent the reports to my doctor and said, do these look okay? Should I take them? And he said, yes. He was the one that really made the mistake. And they were sent December 23, and so everybody was out of town for Christmas, and the embryologist was gone. And the doctor just kind of glanced over it. And I remember him saying, I only see part of this, or something like that. But I didn't know how embryology reports are organized.

[21:56] Greer: 
No.

[21:56] Amy: 
And in hindsight, he only had basically the cover sheet, but he still told me to take it. And nobody ever read the embryology report until the day we were signing contracts. And the embryologist read them and said, these were, the story is, and very few people have ever heard of this, but they were created through something called rescue icsi. Sorry, did that?

[22:18] Greer: 
Rescue what?

[22:19] Amy: 
Icsi. I-C-S-I.

[22:22] Greer: 
Okay.

[22:22] Amy: 
It's just a name of how they do this. And what that is is they had done their egg retrieval on this woman, and she was 27 years old. She was young. She had no fertility problems. It's a long story as to why they were doing IVF, but no problems at all. They did an egg retrieval, and they tried to fertilize the eggs, but only three of them actually fertilized. So what they did is the next day, they went in and used a needle and put sperm in with this little needle, like a day later than they really should have. And those types of embryos, nobody really does that anymore. It was something they were doing in 2010. Nobody really does it anymore. But those types of embryos have very low success rates. Very low.

[23:10] Greer: 
Okay.

[23:11] Amy: 
And so the chances of actually getting a child, much less two, out of this batch of embryos, were just incredibly low. And my fertility doctor was just like, you should not take these. So I changed fertility doctors again, and we went through, of course, our adoption agency was involved in the whole, I think there were some very heated discussions between the adoption agency and the embryologist. And I actually think the adoption agency changed some of their policies as a result of this. I can't know for sure that this was about me, but I'm sure our scenario was part of the reason they now only work with certain fertility clinics that know how to do this.

[23:55] Greer: 
Okay, well, that's good.

[23:57] Amy: 
So, yeah, we found out about the embryos that I had had my heart set on. It was just this couple that we just, I mean, we didn't meet them, but we just loved the idea of doing family with them and their kids that they had were super cute. I mean, we had dreams of our kids meeting up every couple of years. Really liked them a lot, and I don't think they did anything wrong. And so, yeah, it was really heartbreaking. And that was June the first, 2017. And then a week later, two weeks later, my mom was diagnosed with cancer. And then she died two weeks after that.

[24:39] Greer: 
Oh, my goodness, Amy. I'm so sorry.

[24:42] Amy: 
Yeah, so that was a horrible, horrible time. And, yeah, it's. I don't even know what to say. It was really hard. But in the meantime, so my adoption agency sent our profile to another couple who had six vitrified blastocysts. So those are the big embryos that a couple was donating, and they had used an egg donor. I found out about them. I spent the last week or so of my mom, four days, five days of my mother's life with her, and she's pretty cognizant until maybe the last 24 hours. And she did know about these embryos. She did know they existed, that we were trying to be matched with them. And a few weeks later, they sent them our profile. And then the couple said, yes, we will donate embryos to you. And they sent us their profile. And can I say, I fell in love with this couple and their daughter the first, I can't say I had that automatic connection with them right off, but we were pretty confident that these were good embryos and we wanted children. And there were six of them, and I was dead set, again, dead set on at least six. The couple seemed, I mean, sweet enough, and at least we knew the story. We did not know the story, obviously, of the anonymous egg donor, but we knew the story of the conception. We knew that our kids have one full blooded biological sibling out there. And we also knew that this was the only set they had like this. So it was this or wait a lot longer. And so we prayed about it, and we said yes. And they donated the embryos to us. They shipped them. The embryos were in Colorado, which to this day, I'm not really sure why they were in Colorado, but they were, and they shipped them to my clinic in Chicago. And this clinic did my paperwork in two weeks, not six months. You have to take a lot of shots and things to get your body ready for a frozen embryo transfer. So first you start with lupron shots, and then you do estradiol patches, and then you do progesterone shots, and you do some sonograms in and out through there. And there are no fertility clinics in South Bend, Indiana, so you have to do it somewhere 2 hours away. So I was going to Chicago. So I drive to Chicago once a week and do a sonogram and a blood test and got all geared up, and everything looked good. And we did the first transfer in November of 2017, and I just didn't get pregnant. And that happens, and it wasn't even a chemical pregnancy. Some people call it, like, you get a positive pregnancy test for a couple of days, but then it just kind of goes away like nothing. And that was pretty heartbreaking. Oh, the other thing I need to add to that story is it's called an embryo transfer, because they transfer it to your uterus. Now, you will hear a lot of people refer to it as the implantation, which is fine, but the problem is, you don't know if there's going to be an implantation. The technical term is transfer. And with my first transfer, there was no implantation. So it was not an implantation. But at the time of the first transfer, the first embryo they thawed out died, which is heartbreaking. It does happen. It does not happen very often. I don't think, in that one, I don't think that really anybody did anything wrong. It happens more often when you thaw it in a different clinic from where it was created.

[28:35] Greer: 
Okay.

[28:36] Amy: 
And the other clinics will send the protocol, this is how we saw our embryos. This is the solution we thaw them in et cetera, et cetera. But it's often very hard to interpret from one clinic to another. And so I think that's probably what happened. And it happens.

[28:51] Greer: 
Did they thaw the embryo and the embryo died before it was transferred to you?

[28:59] Amy: 
Yes.

[29:00] Greer: 
And then did they go ahead and transfer a different embryo at that time?

[29:06] Amy: 
Yes. So they thawed a second one out. And with blastocysts, I don't really know what happens in the case of other, smaller embryos, but with blastocysts, it only takes 45 minutes to thaw them out. So I remember going in there, like, about 45 minutes later than we were supposed to, and that was why. So they picked another embryo, and they thawed it out, and they transferred it to my uterus. And I did not get pregnant, which was pretty heartbreaking. But we still had four more, and we did a bunch of tests for two or three months to make sure everything was okay with my uterus for an embryo transfer. And one of the tests they did showed that my uterus needed to be exposed to progesterone for two days longer than they normally do it. The jury is still out as to whether or not these tests really make a difference or not. But we did them. And I had had a friend that had done these tests and after multiple failed transfers, was pregnant with twins the next cycle. So when I watched her go through that, I said, I am not like, I'm going to do it right away if my doctor says I need to do it. So I did that. And the next cycle, I did two extra days of progesterone. And so we transferred embryo number three. And again, I just did not get pregnant. No miscarriage, no chemical pregnancy, no nothing. I just did not get pregnant. And by that point, I was like, is this ever going to work? We've run through half of our embryos, and they use the ones that they believe to be the most likely to succeed, they use those first. So we've gone through the best ones, but it's all very subjective, hard to know. But the ones that they thought were the best, they had already used. We were now on six day blastocysts, which means these other little embryos, instead of taking five days to become the big embryo with 100, 200 cells, it took them six days to become the big embryo with 100, 200 cells. And that makes them less likely to succeed because it just took them longer to grow. And I guess the stats show that those embryos don't implant and become babies as often. During that time, I found out that a cousin of mine had a set of five embryos that she was not using and that her husband wanted to throw away. And this is a distant cousin, and she had Facebooked us two years before, and the Facebook message had gone to my husband's spam and he found it two years later.

[31:56] Greer: 
Oh, my goodness.

[31:57] Amy: 
It was crazy. And I remember just saying, ask her if she still has them. It had been two years and she did still have them, and she wasn't sure if her husband would agree to give them to us. But I was like, after all the pain I had gone through with getting embryos in the first place, if she wants to give them to me, I will take them. I thought, maybe I'll get one kid out of this batch, but the way things are going, I don't know that I'm going to have two children. And I really had my heart set on two children. Even if they weren't going to be genetically related to each other, I really wanted to have at least two children.

[32:40] Greer: 
Every round of this that you went through, you were adding more months and--

[32:46] Amy: 
Time. Yeah. And I was 42 when I did my first transfer, almost 42. I mean, the whole process just took forever. I got married at 38, and we started trying to get pregnant day one. And this whole thing, it just takes forever. Sometimes it doesn't always take that long for everybody, but more often than not, this whole, if you cannot give birth to your own children biologically the normal way, it takes a long time. But the other thing I should add about embryo donation is there is no biological clock involved in this. Like, you don't run out of time. Your eggs, they are the factor. That is the biological clock, not your uterus. 

[33:36] Greer: 
That's fascinating. So if you've gone through menopause as a woman, can you still carry a pregnancy?

[33:42] Amy: 
Absolutely. They do it all the time. 

Greer: 
Wow. 

Amy: 
You can do it with no ovaries. You can chop both your ovaries off and you can still give birth to a baby.

[33:52] Greer: 
Are you getting, in those cases, a lot of hormones from external sources that they're giving to you at the right moment?

[33:59] Amy: 
Yeah. But you're doing that anyway. I did that.

[34:02] Greer: 
Right.

[34:04] Amy: 
Not everybody. There are ways to do what's called a natural cycle, but most people, the vast majority, do hormone replacement. So everybody's doing it.

[34:14] Greer: 
That's fascinating. Okay.

[34:17] Amy: 
And one of my big questions to my doctor when he said, you're not going to have your own biological children was, how long do we have to do embryo donation? And he didn't want to answer the question. And we kept saying, I'm going to be 40 next year. Like, how long do we have? He's like, oh, you've got plenty of time. I'm like, well, how long do I have? Do I have until I'm 50? Do I have until I'm 60? And finally my husband said, who is the oldest woman you've done embryo donation with? And he really didn't want to say, and he really didn't want to be quoted. And I'm not giving you guys his name, but he said she was 62. 

Greer: 
Wow. 

Amy: 
So, yeah, there's no, like, yes, time was moving on, but it's all just like, I don't want to be a super old parent. It wasn't, I'm going to run out of time and not be able to physically do this. The vast majority of the American public does not understand that the ovaries and the uterus, they are just two totally different things. They are just different worlds. Like uterus, you've got, as long as you have a healthy uterus, you can carry a pregnancy. It does not matter about your ovaries, but the ovaries, that is where the clock is ticking. So these actresses that have babies at 50 and all this stuff, they either used an egg donor or they froze their eggs when they were younger. This was not I naturally got pregnant at 55.

[35:42] Greer: 
Okay, fascinating. So you were about to tell us what happened with your distant cousin's embryos?

[35:48] Amy: 
Yes. Just a long story that kind of weaves in and out of this. So I was in talks with her when I did not get pregnant on the third transfer, and I was just like, I was about to give up on this batch of embryos, but it was a process with her, and I felt committed to this first batch. I mean, this couple had donated their embryos to us, entrusted us with them, and I felt like I needed to give each one of those a chance before I moved on to another batch. But I did want to. I was going to go through two batches before I gave up on embryo donation or embryo adoption. So then in June of 2018, we transferred embryo number four. And I remember my doctor saying, look, are you ready to get pregnant? She's very dramatic and colorful. And my husband and I were both rolling our eyes, and I'm just thinking, I just need to get done with these so I can move on to another batch. And we lost the sonogram photo. My husband messed up on the video during the whole transfer. We were just not expecting it to work, and it did. 

Greer: 
Wow. 

Amy: 
And that was embryo number four, a six day blastocyst. That is my daughter.

[37:11] Greer: 
And it was a year after your mom passed away, right?

[37:15] Amy: 
Yes. I found out I was pregnant a year and a day after my mother died.

[37:21] Greer: 
Oh, my goodness.

[37:22] Amy: 
And also, to add to the drama of the whole mother and all of this, she knew about the embryos. I had my first appointment with that fertility clinic. It was going to be video. Anyway, so I was in Texas. So literally, I woke up. It was the day after my mom died, although she died at, like, 12:00 a.m. But it was like the day after that my mom died. I woke up, wrote her obituary. We did the video meeting with my doctor, and then we went and picked out graves for my mom and my dad. 

Greer: 
Wow. 

Amy: 
It was a very intense time. But, yes, I found out I was pregnant a year and a day after my mom passed away. So it was great. Of course, my numbers looked good, but there's no guarantee you're not going to have chemical pregnancy or you're going to have a miscarriage or any of those. It was a stressful pregnancy because you want this child so badly and you don't know that things won't go wrong. However, I had never had a miscarriage, so I think that helped me not be quite as stressed out as some women might be. And the pregnancy was fine. I was 43 years old. It was fine. I know a lot of women younger than I that had much harder pregnancies. Much, much harder. I did get gestational diabetes, but it's really just a hassle. It's not really that big of a deal. You just control it. You don't get to eat ice cream your last trimester and do all those crazy things. But it was fine. And my daughter was born perfect. No problems with her. This is a long story, but I did have huge fibroid tumors, which didn't get in the way of pregnancy or whatever, but it's crazy. Oh, my story is so crazy. I grow fibroids like a factory, and I do not think these contributed to any of my infertility issues or whatever, but I had this huge fibroid tumor, and because of that, I knew I was going to have to have a C-section, which isn't a big deal. But my daughter was, like, sideways, and my OB couldn't pull her out. And you can't leave a baby in very long once you've cut the uterus open, or they can get brain damage because of lack of oxygen. And so he pulled her so hard that he pulled her out by her left leg, and he broke her right femur. 

Greer: 
Oh, my goodness. 

Amy: 
And it was like. I mean, it was like the X-ray was like, it was like a toothpick. Yeah. And nobody at St. Joseph Hospital had ever heard of this before. It was really bizarre, but little baby bones heal really fast. We took her to Indy. They put her in this little strappy thing called a pavlic harness, and within two weeks, it had set and was good. They took the harness off. Within a year, you couldn't even tell it ever happened.

[40:18] Greer: 
Oh, my. Wow. So, no real cast even.

[40:21] Amy: 
No, not a real cast. No.

[40:23] Greer: 
That's wild. Okay.

[40:25] Amy: 
It was wild. I mean, the guy in Indy who treats, like, every child in the state for broken bones. Yes, he had seen it before, but other than that, nobody had ever seen it, but other than that. And that was very bizarre. It's one in 5 million. Other than that and gestational diabetes my pregnancies were fine. I did not breastfeed great. Which can have to do with age, can have to do with IVF. I didn't have enough supply, so I did have to supplement. So I really only pulled off breastfeeding for two months, six weeks, something like that. It becomes very difficult once you're breastfeeding and supplementing. Instead of being up in the middle of the night for 30 minutes, it's like 2 hours. Right? It's really rough.

[41:10] Greer: 
Yeah.

[41:12] Amy: 
So my daughter, she's great. She's smart, she's beautiful. So we did see pictures of our donor's little girl when we matched with them, but she was only like a year old, like, she was still a baby when we saw these pictures of her. And you just really want, everybody really wants these kids to look like them. It's a natural thing. And we couldn't really tell what this kid looked like. She was beautiful, but she was just, she was a little baby. And they didn't send us any pictures of the genetic father, and they didn't have any pictures of the egg donor. I don't know if the couple ever saw a photo. They might have seen one, but they weren't able to keep them. So we just had kind of no idea what this child would look like. But when I was pregnant with my daughter, our donors or placing parents sent us more photos, and they sent us a photo of their daughter. And this girl is beautiful. She looks like a Latin beauty queen. Like, she's gorgeous, but she does not look like a child we would have at all because you're not really seeing my picture, but I have blonde hair, blue eyes. My husband has brown hair, green eyes, hazel eyes, and we're just your kind of white mutt. And we knew that these embryos are half italian, so we knew that maybe they weren't going to look like us, but the daughter was, I mean, gorgeous, but black hair, brown eyes, olive skin, and we were just kind of like, well, people are probably going to know our kids are adopted, but, oh, well. And when my daughter was born, she had blue eyes and fair skin, and she was fairly bald. But when her hair came in, like, she's blonder than I am, she looked like my mini me, and she has none of my genes. And her biological sister is the complete opposite complexion of her.

[43:23] Greer: 
What a surprise. I'm wondering, what were you concerned about for your kids, like, did you feel like they were going to get asked about it constantly?

[43:34] Amy: 
I wasn't--I was slightly concerned that they might get asked, or a lot of times children who, I have a friend who worked with me in South Bend who was adopted as a baby, and she had a brother who was not biologically related to her who was also adopted in their home, and he struggled more with his identity in their family. Because he did not look like the parents or his sister, but she looked just like her parents, and that made her feel like she belonged more.

[44:00] Greer: 
That's interesting.

[44:02] Amy: 
I think not everybody is like this, but almost everybody I've talked to who's doing adoption or embryo adoption would really like their children to look like them. And it might not be coming from a good place, but it's this desire to, I don't know, does it help you feel like they're yours? I mean, I don't know what to say, but I will say it is more common than not. We did not transfer two embryos at a time because twin pregnancies are very dangerous. A lot of people lose twins. I had a friend that lost twins at 21 weeks, and there's also the chance these embryos, they can split in two. I know a woman who had triplets after transferring two embryos. I know two women who've had triplets after transferring two embryos. So we only did one at a time. But we're old. We wanted to be done. So about a year after my daughter was born, we started talking about starting to have a second. Then yeah, I started to gear up. Oh, I had that stupid fibroid removed and then started to gear up to do a little more testing, and then I was going to do a transfer, and I got halfway through the testing and had to cancel because the pandemic hit, and all the fertility clinics were closed and shut down for a while. And then there was the pandemic. The pandemic made fertility treatments incredibly complicated and incredibly risky financially. You pay a lot of money for these, and if you showed up with a fever, at least this is what they told me, you would have to reschedule, which means you lose the whole cycle. You lose thousands of dollars. You can't just reschedule. They have to do these sonograms at the right time. Yeah. In August, I was gearing up to do another one of the test cycles, and then my husband and I got Covid. Luckily, before I really spent a lot of money or did a lot of tests. So then we had to wait. I was waiting for my period. It just got delayed and delayed and delayed, and finally I did the test again. And then finally I was able to transfer embryo number five in February of 2021. And I was not expecting it to work because it took us four embryos to have a kid the last time. And we're down to the bottom of the batch on our six day blastocyst that at least my daughter's six day blastosis was looking pretty good. But this one was like, I mean, they pulled it up on the screen, and I'm not an embryologist, but I was like, wow, that thing does not look like Josephine's embryo. It ;ooked like it was small. It was like with Joe's, you could tell it was. Embryos are actually in a shell, like, kind of like a chicken or. It's the egg. The egg has a shell. Yep. And Josephine was, they call it hatching, and it is hatching like she was hatching. You could see, like, the little blob was coming out of the shell. Like, she was big. This embryo was like, it did not quite fill the shell. There was empty space in there. It was small. And I was like, oh, my gosh. I wasn't laughing, but I was like, I don't know if this thing's going to work. And two days after that transfer, I got really sick. So two days later, I took my temperature. It was like 101.5. I should have been taking, you can take Tylenol. Like, that's safe for pregnancy, and they don't want you to have this crazy high fever while you're, like, your embryo is trying to implant. And everything went wrong. And of course, my doctor's answer to every medical problem was, maybe you have Covid. And I already had Covid, like, two months ago. I don't think I have it again. And at that time, people weren't getting Covid twice. And I did not have Covid, but I did not expect it. I remember journaling the day of the pregnancy test, saying, just kind of journaling this goodbye. I'm sorry I failed you, little embryo. Like, really sad. My husband gave me this big hug before I went in for the pregnancy test. And I knew he was thinking it didn't work. And I went in for the blood test that morning, and I had had some symptoms, but it's all, like, in your mind at that point, you just don't know. Your mind is playing tricks on you and you are analyzing every little thing going on in your body. But the one thing that had happened for me with my daughter that did not happen with the embryo transfers that failed was I started spotting later on, and it was not implantation bleeding. It was because I had to do these progesterone suppositories. And if I'm pregnant, if anybody's pregnant, their cervix is very sensitive. And so if I was pregnant, those suppositories made me bleed. And so the afternoon of the blood test, when I had not gotten the results back, I started spotting, and I was like, yes, I'm pregnant. 

Greer: 
Wow. 

Amy: 
And so what's usually spotting is like, people are absolutely freaking out because they think they're going to have a miscarriage. But for me, I was like, I think it worked. And it took forever for them to call me with the results of the blood test. And my husband came home from work, and he's like, we were going to listen to a voicemail together. And he's like, have they called? And he's like, they haven't called. And so I decided to take a pregnancy test. Now, most women start taking pregnancy tests, like, the second day after their transfer, and it doesn't usually show up until, like, day five, but you can take home pregnancy tests for these. But, so I took a pregnancy test, and it was positive, and that was my son, Thaddeus. And he's not a little pipsqueak embryo anymore. He's a pretty thick, big boy.

[50:11] Greer: 
That's amazing. How unusual. I mean, most parents don't have the relationship where they have seen the blastocyst that their child developed from.

[50:22] Amy: 
Yes. I'm always telling, I mean, he's only two, but my daughter is almost five now. And I'm like, look at Thaddy's little embryo was really scrawny. And I just tell her the story. Like, I did not think he was going to make it, but he did. And she loves that story. Yeah. So I had Thaddeus, had gestational diabetes again, had a huge fibroid again, but no broken femur this time.

[50:51] Greer: 
That's good.

[50:52] Amy: 
No broken femur. He was head down, and there was a little spot just big enough to pull him through. So he did great, and he was a great breastfeeder, but I didn't have enough milk for him, so I again breastfed for about a month and then just did complete formula. And that was during the formula shortage, but it was really, I think most people's experience was as long as you didn't need specialty formulas, you were okay. So, yeah, Thaddy. And then when Thaddeus was six months old, I finally pulled myself together enough to go get an annual physical and get a mammogram, go to the dentist. I mean, things like that.

[51:38] Greer: 
Take care of yourself.

[51:39] Amy: 
Yes, to finally take care of myself. Not just about having a baby, take care of myself. So I pull it together, do all that stuff. And I'd had, like, this, my shoulder had kind of started hurting. Not all the time, but really, when I sleep on it, on my side, I'm a side sleeper, and it was just really hard to sleep on my right side. I told my doctor about it, and I had had a herniated disc in my neck, like, nine years before. And she said, well, let's get an MRI on it and just see if that disc has gotten bad again. So I was like, okay. So I figured that's what she'd say. So I went. A week or so later, I got an MRI, and the secretary calls me with just, like, reading the radiology report to me, and she's reading stuff about lesions and rule out multiple sclerosis. And I'm like, what? And I call my doctor. I talked to her, and she's like, you don't have MS, but go in and do the follow up MRIs. They want to do one of your brain and your thoracic spine. So I was like, okay. So I went in a few weeks later, and I got two more MRIs done, and they call me, and they're just, some secretary is reading off this MRI report, and it's about lesions and more MS and all this stuff. And I go back to my doctor, and she's asking me all these questions. Have you had weakness in your arms or legs? No. Have you had vision problems? No. She's like, I don't think you have MS, but you need to go follow up with a neurologist. So I follow up with a neurologist, and he's like, you have MS.

[53:08] Greer: 
Wow.

[53:10] Amy: 
Which was hard. And turns out, in retrospect, the neurologist, this particular neurologist, I think, could have handled a regular MS case. But the really complicated part about my MS case was that I had another embryo that I needed to transfer. I personally would not discard an embryo, but I also had a legal contract that said I couldn't.

[53:34] Greer: 
Oh, okay. That's really interesting.

[53:36] Amy: 
Yeah, that was part of the adoption agency thing. I mean, these people that are donating their embryos, most of them want to give them a chance at life, and they don't want to give them to people who are going to throw them away. So I couldn't legally do it, and I wouldn't have done it anyway. So the only thing I could do was, if I didn't use it myself, was the only thing I could do was to give it to another family. And I knew that families do not want just one embryo. I was honestly ticking through the list of my friends who might take it, but I really, really didn't want to do that, because then potentially my children have yet another full blooded biological sibling being raised in yet another family, and I just couldn't look them in the eye and say, I gave your sister away. Although even though it's a potential baby, it's a potential whatever. So I just knew that I had to. If it was within the realm of safe enough. Everything is a risk, but safe enough. If the doctor said, it's okay to do this, I needed to do it. And it was one of the most stressful seasons of my life. That last transfer was possibly the most stressful one. And part of the stress was I didn't want a third child. I did not want a third child. I was old, I was tired. I had MS. It just really stressed me out. But if it was this child, if it was my children's sibling, then I did want that child. It's a very complicated situation to be in and to explain to anybody who has never been in that situation. But I felt like this was my child, I was this child's mother, and I had to carry it. And it was just this really visceral, I don't know the word, but I had to be the one to give it a chance at life.

[55:43] Greer: 
Yeah. I mean, it strikes me you'd been on such a journey that you felt that real closeness.

[55:54] Amy: 
Yes, and I would not have felt like that, I didn't feel like this other batch of my cousins that I did end up adopting and shipping to Chicago and having on hand because I didn't think my batch was going to work. I will get into the end of that story in a minute. But we donated, my cousin and I donated that batch to another couple in Texas who were unable to have their own children. She actually didn't have any eggs, period. None, but did have a healthy uterus. We donated them, but I felt no obligation to that batch other than I don't want them to be thrown away and I want them to be donated to a couple that I believe will raise them well, that's the only obligation I felt to those embryos, but to the one that was my children's genetic sibling, I was willing to risk a lot, a lot for, even though it had none of my DNA and none of my husband's DNA, it had my kids' DNA in it, and I could not look them in the eye and tell them I gave it away. If it were a scenario where I had three embryos left, I could not have done three embryos, and so I would have had to have donated them, and I wouldn't have felt really all that, it would have been really hard, but I would have felt like I couldn't do it. But with one, I can do one. I can do one like you can do, it's just one. You can have one more child. Pray, pray, pray they don't split and turn into identical twins. My first neurologist said, just wait to do MS treatments until after your transfer. And I went in and got a second opinion at Northwestern, mainly because I just wasn't convinced I had MS. because I was not sick. I was really tired. But I had a six month old and a two year old, like, who isn't tired, right. And so I went in to get a second opinion, and this neurologist was at Northwestern was like, oh, yes, you clearly have MS. And she also said, you should not be doing fertility treatments until you do MS treatment because the pregnancy is good for MS, but fertility treatments are not, especially fertility treatments when you have MS that has not been treated at all. And there was only one treatment that she believed was strong enough to protect me from the hormones and stuff you have to do for fertility treatments and safe for pregnancy. There was only one, and my insurance would not approve. This was a stressful time. I was not sleeping well. Yeah, my insurance wouldn't approve it. So Northwestern wrote to the manufacturer of this, it's an infusion that wipes out all your B cells, wrote to them and asked for a grant for them to give me this treatment for free. And they said yes. And so Northwestern did it absolutely for free. They billed my insurance $27,000 and my insurance paid them $81.

[59:10] Amy: 
So I did this, and I was able to do it exactly the right time that I needed to do it based on when I was going to do the embryo transfer like you were supposed to do the treatment and do the transfer, I think exactly three months after the treatment. So I was able to do that. And I was able to talk to a neurologist at Northwestern that had done extensive research on MS and fertility treatments. There's probably like two people in the world that know about that kind of stuff, and she did. So I was able to talk to her. So I did the transfer on January the 9th, and I was just elated that I was able to do it. And by the time I was doing the treatments and gearing up for it, I did want the child, and I was genuinely praying that we would have a baby through this. My husband wanted a baby the whole time. But I did not get pregnant. I did not have a miscarriage. I did not have a chemical pregnancy. I did not get pregnant. And it was sad and it's always kind of bittersweet, but my family, I had always felt like after I had Thaddeus, I felt like my family was complete. I would envision my family and the future of just being my son and my daughter, and just this sense of joy would enter my heart. So, yeah, it was sad that we lost the last one, but not nearly as devastating as the first three, and still am just so glad that I was able to carry that last embryo and that I can tell my children I gave every single one of those a chance. So that was my story. Oh, and then the backup batch, my cousin's batch of embryos. The day before I was supposed to go in for a lumbar puncture to test my MS, I get an email from my fertility clinic that says, and that was the day they were going to ship the embryos back to Texas, I get an email from my fertility clinic that says, we went to pack these up and we realized that two of them were missing.

[01:01:10] Greer: 
How do embryos go missing?

[01:01:14] Amy: 
That is a really good question, Greer. What I've gathered through talking to all these embryologists, and my cousin has really wanted to sue her clinic. We really believe that her clinic lost them. It actually wasn't my clinic. It seems like what happened is, oh, gosh, there's so much background to this. The fertility industry is incredibly unregulated. There are more protocols surrounding your blood sample and your Covid sample than your embryos, sperm and donor eggs. Only in two states is it required to have a license for a storage facility for embryos. I mean, it's hard to wrap your brain around. There's no requirements for fertility clinics to report how many embryos they lose, how many embryos they thaw out and kill when they weren't supposed to, how many eggs they might lose, how much sperm they might. And these are precious things that cannot be replaced. All these clinics use different storage devices for embryos. There's no standardization. There's no like, oh, this is the tube. They all look like this. This is what we check to make sure they're there. There are all kinds of different tubes out there, especially older tubes. These were frozen in 2012. And so this fertility clinic that is in Texas probably was using some of their own tubes that they created. And they were created in such a way that the labeling was very different. Every other set of storage devices they'd ever seen, you just pull it out of the, can you look at it, you check the label, you check the packaging slip. It's there. But with this one, you actually need to look inside and see if that interior tube had fallen out. But they'd never seen anything like that before, and so I think they missed it. Honestly, I think it was probably lost in the clinic in Austin, but I don't know. And it was just a bizarre, the embryologist there had never seen it.

[01:03:13] Greer: 
How bizarre, 

[01:03:14] Amy: 
I knew this. by the time I did my last transfer, I already knew these were missing. The poor woman who we donated to them, who thought she was getting five, only got three because somebody lost two of them. My poor cousin was devastated also because she really felt like these were her children. Even though her family was complete, she didn't want any more kids. She really felt like these were her children. And she also cannot be guaranteed that they didn't put them in somebody else. And she might have some biological children out there she's not aware of.

[01:03:47] Greer: 
There's so much to think about.

[01:03:50] Amy: 
A lot to think about, and we don't ask these questions. Storage is not done nearly as scientifically as you would think. There's better tracking for Amazon packages than for embryos.

[01:04:04] Greer: 
It's scary.

[01:04:04] Amy: 
It's really, the fertility industry is really, I have seen the underbelly of it, and there is some really bad stuff. It's a lot, like my master's is in intercultural studies, and you look at a lot at sociological factors. There's a lot of people with a lot of power and a lot of money and almost no accountability, and then a lot of desperate families, women, men who desperately want a baby and are willing to do anything to do it. And then you have this industry with an incredible amount of power and very little accountability, and it's a really bad situation.

[01:04:43] Greer: 
And you've sort of seen the best and the worst.

[01:04:49] Amy: 
I had children through this, and I am incredibly grateful. 20 years ago would not have been able to give birth to my adopted children. So I'm incredibly grateful. But some changes need to be made. I think they do a lot better job in Europe and some other countries.

[01:05:11] Greer: 
If we could just shift gears a little bit. I'm wondering how the experience of carrying pregnancies through embryo adoption affected your sense of yourself and your relationship with your body. You went through so much.

[01:05:24] Amy: 
I feel like I was able to do this, and it doesn't work for everyone. And I feel like when I talk to people and tell them I had babies at 43 years old and 45, I feel like I have to qualify, but I wasn't able to do this naturally. These were adopted embryos. I almost feel like if I were able to do that, I would be bragging about my fertility powers, and I don't want to give people the idea that I'm that fertile. That sounds really weird. I guess after going through infertility, I feel this strange need to be honest with people about the fact that I was not able to do this on my own, with my own DNA. But it was great to be able to carry my own children, even though they're not biologically related to me. And I do believe there's some anecdotal data that leads me to believe that the reason my daughter has blonde hair and blue eyes is because she might have had recessive genes for that, but they might have become dominant because I carried her. There's this whole field called epigenetics. That's about how environment influences what genes manifest. Being pregnant was, I wasn't one of these women that's like, oh, I love being pregnant, but it was good to have had that experience. There are times I feel like the impostor complex, I guess, is what I'm expressing here. I'm now able to, after being single for so long and then not being able to have children naturally and having children so old, I feel kind of now just kind of in normal arenas with women, with children, and I feel like an imposter. I feel like I don't deserve, like I'm faking it in a way, like it's not for real. I don't really know how to explain that. It does not make me feel like, oh, my body was able to pull this off, if that's what you're asking. Does that answer your question?

[01:07:49] Greer: 
Those are great reflections. Yeah, I really appreciate hearing all of that. Was there something that was important to you about having that experience of pregnancy versus other pathways you might have taken towards parenting when you were told that you couldn't have biological children of your own?

[01:08:09] Amy: 
Yes, there were two or three things that were very important. I do believe you have a real bond with a child you give birth to and breastfeed, even if they don't have any of your DNA. And I do believe that sometimes children need to be placed with other families at birth. I get it. I don't deny that or whatever, but I think that that is hard on the child. And so to not have that trauma of being separated with a birth parent, to have children that haven't gone through, that was important to me, and I had to be the one to bear them to do that. I had to be the one pregnant with them. So that was important. But the other thing that was really one of the main reasons we went through embryo adoption was my husband and I both believe that children who are placed for adoption, which again, traditional adoption, is a beautiful thing, and a lot of children are in much better scenarios when they're placed with a family. And birth mothers are just the bravest, most sacrificially loving people in the world. But women who are placing their children for adoption are going through really hard stuff. If they're in a situation where they feel like they need to place their child for adoption, they are stressed out, and oftentimes they are using substances. They're just not doing prenatal care that I was able to do. And I wanted to be in charge of the prenatal care. I wanted to know that my babies were not addicted to opium when they were born, that they were not going to be born with fetal alcohol syndrome, that type of prenatal care, and just the exposure to trauma of being separated with a birth parent or the trauma of developing in a womb that has high cortisol levels, that's the hormone that's produced when people are stressed out. Cortisol can really affect the development of a child, even in utero. I just felt like it was much, my being able to carry the child, I would be able to have a child that was mentally healthier if I was the one that was the womb that was carrying it. So that was a big part of it. And then adopting children out of foster care or children that are not placed at birth, you have an additional level of trauma that they have almost always gone through. I don't know why a child that's two years old would be placed with another family if they haven't gone through trauma. There's usually an abusive situation or drugs or whatever, like things that are trauma that are definite. If you're from, I'm sure you're familiar, Greer, with the ACE inventory, adverse childhood experiences. They're going to be high on the ACEs inventory. That's a hard thing to bear. I feel like you really have to have a genuine calling to raise children who are struggling with that. And children need families and loving parents. And like I said, I have friends who have taken that on and I respect them deeply. I, after having worked with people dealing with homelessness for a decade and my husband as well, we've worked with a lot of people who've gone through a lot of childhood trauma, and we've seen the effects of that, and we just didn't feel called to raise children that were going to be a whole lot like the people we were working with in our nine to five jobs. Like it was just too much.

[01:12:06] Greer: 
Yeah, that's important discernment. I think you were able to be really honest with yourself in that.

[01:12:12] Amy: 
Yeah. And also another factor was, I know a number of families that have done traditional adoption and one set of friends in particular that adopted two children from Ethiopia. And they were, I think both kids were about two, maybe when they came to live with them. And this family just really wanted to adopt. They had three of their own biological children. It was not based on any infertility issues at all. But their mother would say that they are just really a classic, like, look at their family and you get a pretty good picture of what adoption can be. One of their children is a great kid. He's a great kid. Not valdictorian of his class or one of these stories of, yes, he becomes a brain surgeon, but he is a great kid. And the other one got into drugs and got violent and got put in jail and is homeless on the streets now. And that is, I believe, based on childhood trauma from whatever happened to them before they made it into this family. And it's just heartbreaking to me to think that could happen with any kid, but it is much more statistically likely to happen with a child that goes through childhood trauma. And from my friends that, other friends, all my friends who've done traditional adoption, especially if they're further down the road, their commentary is almost always, well, first of all, people will judge people like me for doing embryo adoption, but nobody who has done traditional adoption would ever judge because they know what it's like to go through all that. I've never heard a judgmental comment from someone who has adopted, done traditional adoption. Most of them have, I mean, definitely not said, oh, I wish I'd gone that route, but definitely respected our choice if they'd gone through, we just, our eyes were very open, much more open than I think most people's are. I have another friend who, different friend, who adopted children, four from Ethiopia, and she loves her kids and doesn't regret having them. But she said, if I knew what I knew now, I don't know that I would go this route. They also adopted because they wanted to adopt, not because of infertility, but, yeah, childhood trauma. We are just very aware of the effects of that and didn't feel up to it. And again, my husband and I have worked with people dealing with this for years and years and years. It's our full time job away from the home, and we just didn't feel up to doing it in the home. 

[01:14:58] Greer: 
Yeah, I really appreciate you sharing those reflections, and I think it's hard and important for people to be brutally honest with themselves about what they're prepared for and what they're not prepared for and what they imagine for themselves.

[01:15:11] Amy: 
Yeah, I think I just had PTSD from hearing so many childhood trauma stories from people as adults who had dealt with it. And, oh, my gosh, it's just too hard. Too hard. And foster care, you have the added trauma of so many people that want to adopt out of foster care aren't able to adopt. And the goal of foster care is for them to be reunited with their families, and it should be the goal of foster care. But if you're going into that wanting to have kids, you're setting yourself up for extreme heartbreak. Often it's a huge risk.

[01:15:50] Greer: 
Yeah, I'm looking forward to hearing some stories along those lines later in the season, for sure. Well, you've shared so much, so I don't want to keep you much longer, but I did want to ask just one last question, and that is: do you have an insight you could share with us into how we as women can listen well to our bodies and our hearts as we move through making these family formation choices in our lives?

[01:16:15] Amy: 
Yeah. Bodies. I don't have as much reflection on that, which I know this podcast has a lot to do with that. My one reflection is if you can, try to have children when you're younger. If you get married at 35, don't wait two years to try to get pregnant. Just don't. Like, age is a factor. Hearts, I address that a little bit, but it's easy when you are dealing with infertility, to be so blinded by your desire for a child that you make decisions that are not good for your family. And I think we need to be cognizant of that. So have people in your life who've gone down whatever route before that will be honest with just, again, it's just so hard to see straight. I read an article in the BBC a few months ago about all of these babies in Spain in the 1950s that were kidnapped and basically sold to families that couldn't have children. There was like hundreds, maybe thousands of these that were born in these hospitals. And the nuns, this was like under Francisco Franco, the nuns would, like, tell the birth mother that the baby had died, but really they gave it to another family. I think they kind of knew they were basically kidnapping children because they were so desperate to have a child.

[01:17:46] Greer: 
It's horrifying.

[01:17:47] Amy: 
It's horrifying. I read this article and I just kept reading and reading. It was long and it was late at night, and I was asking myself, like, why am I so horrified by this? But I realized these families, these are good people. These were active church members. These were people very, they gave to the poor, they were active in charities. They were like your model citizens. And you ask yourself, how could they justify that? And I don't think anybody listening to this podcast is considering kidnapping a child because they're infertile. I mean, that's not, but it showed me how good people can be really blinded by their desperate desire to have a child. And so be careful about that, be aware of that, and try to think things through well, and have people speak honestly to you, who will speak honestly to you, really assess, are you really able to go through a traditional adoption and raise a child that has fetal alcohol syndrome who, like my friend's sister, is? This is another family that was adopted, who's, where is she? Is she in jail now or homeless? Pregnant in her car? I can't remember. But is your heart prepared for that? Will you be good parents in that kind of scenario? It might happen, it might not. But you need to ask yourself those questions. And then if you go the embryo adoption route or fertility treatments or whatever, that's also a whole potential emotionally traumatic roller coaster. You have to ask yourself, how many of these embryo transfers can I take emotionally? My friend who adopted our set of, she thought, five embryos that then was three, she transferred all three of them and only had a chemical pregnancy at the last transfer, and she's doing traditional adoption now because she can't handle the fertility route anymore. And I don't blame her. She knows her heart can't take it and she just can't do it. So you do have to ask, how much can you take and how much money are you willing to spend and how long are you willing to wait? There's a lot of questions. Unfortunately, if you're not able to just naturally, easily conceive your own children, you don't only have to bear the pain of not having your own genetic children. You almost always bear a whole lot of other additional complications and hard questions and painful situations and losses. And I wish it weren't like that, but it usually is.

[01:20:35] Greer: 
I really appreciate how honest you've been with us today, Amy, and just really looking brass tacks at the reality you've gone through and all the questions you had to weigh. And I'm really happy for you that you have the family that you have now. And thank you for sharing your story with us.

[01:20:54] Amy: 
Yeah, you're welcome. And, yes, it was a difficult journey, but I could not be happier with where I'm at. I love my kids, and I could not be happier.

[01:21:06] Greer: 
That's so good to hear. If today's episode resonated with you, I'd love to hear from you. You can email me at femammalpodcast@gmail.com. That's femammalpodcast@gmail.com. You can also follow this podcast on Facebook. Just search for Femammal Podcast and you will find a community of people who are interested in living well in our bodies. And, of course, I'd love for you to rate this podcast and leave a review wherever you download your podcasts. Until next time, be well.