An Alternative to Transracial / International Adoption for the Infertile

A recent post on The Thinking Housewife asks what can be done for Christians who are infertile but wish to have their own children, but may have ethical problems with in-vitro procedures.  A not-so-obvious alternative for many women is a new form of adoption called embryo adoption.  This is a process where “leftover” embryos from other couples’ in-vitro procedures can be implanted into an adoptive mother.  There are several advantages to this alternative:

1. Since you carry and give birth to the child, the child is your natural-born child under the law.  The rights of the genetic parents to come and harass your claim to the child is limited.  I know this is a major factor in many international / transracial adoptions, as it’s harder for a birth mother in a Third World country to change her mind and sue you.

2. The child is better prepared psychologically for the reality of their adoption.  The birth mother is their mother in every way except genetics.

3. It is easy, almost trivial, to adopt Caucasian embryos, unlike live Caucasian babies.  In fact, you can even select a donor family that resembles your own as much as possible.  If this is done, the child may care little about their genetic origins given they were carried to term by their actual birth mother, since they look like their family.  Most of the trauma of adoption is related to feelings of rejection from the birth mother, and this is totally avoided with embryo adoption.

4. Embryo adoption is half the price of IVF, and carries none of the ethical concerns.  You are giving life to embryos that would otherwise be discarded or frozen indefinitely.

5. The genetic traits of the children, their intelligence, health and personalities, will be similar to those of the genetic parents, who tend to come from stable middle class homes.  People who undergo IVF have to spend $10,000 cash per try, so that generally means the genetics of the child come from responsible, functional middle class adults.  Many Christians are naive to the influences of genetics on child behavior, and the limitations of even the best parents to improve a child with genetic limitations.  Blood always tells, as Southerners used to say.

For women who cannot give birth to an adopted embryo, it is also still possible to find Caucasian children available for care in the foster home system.  While I would never bring a foster child in to live with my natural born children, such an outreach ministry to a child could make sense to an infertile couple without their own children.  While the adoption process is more painful (with more opportunities for birth parents to change their minds and such), the benefits to a child thrown away by the system could be immeasurable.  And as a foster parent you can kind of “try out” the child, at no harm to them (they’re already in the system anyway), to see if they might be a good fit as an adopted child.

There are many reasonable alternatives to trotting halfway around the world at great expense to adopt a child; there are many children of our own people and country who need adoptive parents.