Everyone has their own reasons for adopting. It's a deeply personal decision, but I want to iterate very strongly that adopting is not something that happens by accident. It is a long road, with a lot of literal and emotional expense, and the people who become adoptive parents do so explicitly on purpose.
Having said that, it would be disingenuous to deny that there is a component of philanthropy involved in the decision. We want to expand our family, true enough, but we also want to provide a stable and loving home to a child who would otherwise not have the opportunity. It's a very fine line to walk between "saving" someone, a.k.a. making them a charity case, and becoming parents.
I think that caring for children, whether they are our biological offspring or not, is something innate in the human animal. We want to nurture and love and prepare the next generation to take our place, and whether that generation shares our DNA seems, to me, to be an inconsequential detail in the grand scheme. This is not to belittle biological children in any way, but rather to express awe and wonder at the human capacity for love and kindness.
We decided very early in our marriage (in our relationship in general, even) that, ideally, we'd like a blended family. I don't personally subscribe to the idea that we shouldn't be having children (as a species) or that we should be having fewer because of limited resources or because there are "plenty" of kids out there that already need homes. I understand the point people are making with regard to that philosophy, but it's never been a tenet of my belief system. Having said that, I should point out that Allen subscribes to that belief somewhat - possibly as a result of his philosophy training? I'm not sure - you'll have to ask him his reasons. So for me, adoption is not something I feel a moral obligation to instead of biological children.
The plain and simple reason for me (for us) is that we have so much love between us, we feel that the next logical step is to share it with another. There are times when I feel as though the love I feel when I look at Allen is literally seeping out of cracks in my skin. As though my body isn't big enough to contain it. I want a baby to pass that love on to - someone to absorb the excess in love between me and my husband, and maybe, just maybe, reflect a little bit of it back. I have all of the other usual cravings too: someone to pass on our Christmas night lasagna dinner to, someone to teach all manner of crafting techniques, someone to bake silly birthday cakes for, someone cuddle on the couch with while reading, someone to make our lives light up from the inside in a way that only children can.
I don't want to go into too much medical detail here - it's a very private subject - but I will say that we are not precluding the possibility of biological children. That endeavor has not been, um, successful for us in the past year and a half, and while there are options to explore on that front, I don't feel comfortable with a host of medical interventions of increasing severity, at this point. For the time being, we are taking an "if it happens, it happens" approach to biological children.
Since adoption is something we always planned for anyway, and we are "ready" to have kids, we thought this was a great way to add to our family without putting a medical strain on our relationship. Treatment for infertility can be stressful both emotionally and physically, not to mention costly. Much of the available medical intervention may not be covered under our existing medical insurance, but more importantly, I don't want to put the strain on my physical and mental resources. We want children, but neither of us need that child to be biological.
From the information we have gathered thus far, it would seem that there is a great deal of emphasis placed on grieving for your own lost fertility before pursuing adoption. While we have confronted grief in our journey thus far, I don't think grieving over a lost opportunity, in terms of fertility, is something that either of us has felt is necessary. Even if it turns out that we can never have biological children, we know that we will be parents. It may not be the way we thought it would happen, but we will, sometime in the foreseeable future, be parents to our son and/or daughter, and the circumstances of how that came to be will not dictate how much love we have for our child. We anticipate loving our kid(s) beyond the boundaries of what we conceived of as possible, and then a bit more after that. I see no reason to grieve for a perceived (or even real) fertility loss when we have so much to celebrate and look forward to in our adoption journey.
I'm not sure why this is so important for me to say, but it is: this is in no way a "last resort" for us. We are consciously choosing this for a variety of reasons, first and foremost being that we have a lot of love to share. We are not doing this because we have no other options or because we "have" to or for any other reason that would make it seem like we didn't want to do this but had no other choice. Choice is so key to our journey. We are choosing to adopt. Maybe we are helping someone have a better life than they would have otherwise, maybe we are giving a woman peace of mind knowing that even though she could not care for her child, she gave that baby to a family that could - a family who would love them to the ends of the earth. But really, at the end of the day, we want to share our love and our lives with a child. (Well, several children, actually, but we'll start with one.) Our admittedly hippy philosophical bent makes adoption a natural choice for us. We've got a lot of love to give, and we can't wait to get started!
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