Give Up on Fertility, and Get Pregnant?

Around this time my daughter started preschool.  She developed an immediate friendship with a little girl in her class adopted from China.  After getting to know this little girl and her mother, I was intrigued by the idea of adopting.  There were thousands of little girls in China abandoned because of the One-Child Policy.  The process was relatively painless, and the wait was a mere nine months from your completed paperwork.  The only difficulty was the issue of convincing my husband.  It was expensive, but there were tax breaks, significant ones, and I used them as a principal aide in persuading him.  I worked on securing something short of an emphatic “no”, and after a couple of weeks we had an appointment with an adoption agency.

We embarked upon our new mission fully reinvigorated. I assembled the paperwork, enrolled in Chinese class, and my husband and I attended “Waiting Family Meetings” once a month.  My daughter and I visited the Forbidden City via Google Earth and she played “adoption” with all her little babies.  We were fingerprinted and our paperwork was officially logged-in in China April 6, 2006.  We hoped to travel sometime after the holidays.  We viewed this opportunity not only as a way to expand our family, but to expand our knowledge of history, culture and our community as we began to surround ourselves with others who had adopted from China.  I was getting ready to turn 39. 

As the months rolled by, I saw many families return from China with their babies in tow.  People really did come home successfully with a baby in need, having gone through the exact same process as we had. Yet, I started to have doubts.  Rumors began to circulate about the length of time between log-in and referral.  What started as a nine-month wait quickly turned into a year and then things really slowed down.  There was much speculation as to the longer wait: there weren’t as many available babies, success of the domestic adoption program, the Chinese Government established a quota for the number of babies they would allow out of the country.  The only thing we knew for certain was that we weren’t going to be traveling any time soon; the wait had ballooned into a three-year delay.  Some suggested China might abolish the program altogether.