Choosing Roads Less Traveled

I remember telling Jacob about my rediscovery of embryo adoption and everything I had been reading about it. He agreed that if we were going to pursue another child, this seemed like the right path. Figuring out whether we would actually choose embryo adoption, however, would take a little longer. I also remember telling my mom. Her first reaction was hesitation, followed almost immediately by a long list of questions. As we talked through the process together, hesitation slowly gave way to fascination. Like me, she was amazed that something like embryo adoption even existed.

Around that same time, I began running into an unexpected challenge. Embryo adoption was already an uncommon road, but we seemed to be approaching that road from an uncommon direction.

Almost everything I read assumed infertility had brought us there. The books, testimonies, articles, and resources were incredibly helpful, but many began with some version of the same story: a couple desperately wanted children, biological parenthood hadn't happened the way they hoped, and embryo adoption offered another path to becoming parents.

That story wasn't ours.

We were already parents to a little boy we adored. As far as we knew, we could probably conceive another biological child if we chose to. We also could have stopped pursuing another child altogether and, after grieving what we had imagined, lived a full and joyful life as a family of three. Embryo adoption wasn't the only road still open to us. We were trying to decide whether, among the roads that remained, it was the one we actually wanted to choose.

That distinction sometimes felt surprisingly lonely.

It wasn't that I couldn't relate to families who had come to embryo adoption through infertility. There was plenty of common ground: hopes for children, plans that had changed, grief over a family that looked different than expected, uncertainty about what came next. But relating often required a leap. Their questions weren't always our questions. Their fears weren't always our fears. Even the reasons they found certain parts of embryo adoption hopeful or difficult weren't necessarily the same as ours.

And because embryo adoption was already something most people had never heard of, I found myself explaining our starting point almost as often as I explained the process itself. Yes, we already have a biological child. No, infertility isn't what brought us here. Yes, we could probably have another biological child. No, we don't believe that's what we should do. Sometimes I wanted to find someone who understood this strange little corner of an already strange road without requiring the footnotes.

Around that time, I came across Frozen, but Not Forgotten by Nate Birt. The book tells the story of a family who pursued embryo adoption while also serving as a practical guide through the process, centering on one of the organizations we were seriously considering. Their circumstances weren't identical to ours either. They hadn't been redirected toward embryo adoption by a genetic diagnosis. But infertility also wasn't their starting point. They had chosen embryo adoption because, after considering what it meant, they believed it was something their family should do.

That came closer.

For the first time, I was reading an embryo adoption story that resonated much more directly with what we were living and experiencing. Nate's family hadn't arrived at quite the same starting line we had, but they were asking some of the same questions. Embryo adoption wasn't the remaining path to the child they desperately wanted. The path itself was part of what they were choosing.

I want to be careful here because none of this diminishes the experiences of families who come to embryo adoption through infertility. I can only imagine the depth of that longing, and I would still wholeheartedly recommend Nate's book regardless of what brings someone to this road. I was just grateful, in a season when our circumstances frequently made us feel like an exception to the assumed story, to encounter someone whose perspective felt a little nearer to our own.

We still didn't have a particularly articulate answer for why we kept coming back to embryo adoption. We knew we hoped for another child, but wanting another child didn't fully explain why we were willing to walk this particular road to welcome one. Nate's story didn't answer that question for us. It did, however, reassure me that it was a question worth asking. It also didn't hurt that Nate is a journalist turned novelist. As someone who appreciates that style of writing, I found myself connecting not only with what he said but with how he said it.

Over the next several weeks, Jacob and I continued wrestling with whether embryo adoption was truly the road we were supposed to take. Along the way, we made some exciting discoveries.

One of the biggest was learning about natural cycle embryo transfers. Rather than relying on hormone injections to prepare for transfer, some women can time the process with their body's natural cycle. If I qualified, that meant avoiding many of the medications, hormone injections, and procedures that had initially made me hesitant about embryo adoption in the first place.

We also gradually narrowed our search to the Snowflakes Embryo Adoption Program through Nightlight Christian Adoptions. As the first organization to offer embryo adoption, they had helped pioneer much of the process, and the more we learned about them, the more comfortable we felt.

But alongside those encouraging discoveries came some difficult ones. One of Nightlight's policies is that families adopt an entire sibling group of embryos rather than selecting only a portion of them. In principle, we loved that. In practice, it was intimidating.

The statistics surrounding embryo survival and successful pregnancy are anything but straightforward. Maternal age at egg retrieval, embryo quality, freezing method, and countless other variables all influence the likelihood of success. Most clinics recommend adopting two or three times as many embryos as the number of children a family hopes to have. But under Nightlight's model, if you adopted three embryos hoping for one child and became pregnant on the first transfer, you were still committed to giving the remaining embryos the opportunity for life as well.

Once again, we found ourselves asking many of the same questions we had wrestled with during infant adoption. Not because the situations were identical, because they weren't, but because they both forced us to honestly evaluate our capacity. How much could we faithfully take on? Were we making decisions out of fear, or were we recognizing healthy limits? There weren't easy answers. Only more opportunities to pray, talk, and search our own hearts.

For both of us, saying yes to embryo adoption represented a tremendous leap. For me, it meant stepping into the unknown. For Jacob, it meant taking a step forward after significant grief. We wrestled with question after question. Did we truly want another child, knowing how difficult pregnancy and the newborn stage had been? Were we prepared to navigate the unique conversations that would eventually come with explaining embryo adoption to a child? What unknown medical challenges might we face? Would we have a healthy relationship with the placing family? Could we really do this?

Eventually, we realized there was a deeper question we needed to answer before we could faithfully answer any of the others. Instead of continuing to ask whether embryo adoption made sense, we needed to solidify our why. Why did we want another child in the first place, and was that reason strong enough to sustain us through everything this particular road might ask of us?

We knew we would need something to hold onto when the process became hard, something that would make the attempt itself feel worthwhile even if, ultimately, it didn't result in another child. We already had an incredible son. We could have grieved the end of this road and continued on as a family of three, so what was compelling us to keep making room for the possibility of someone else? After many conversations, we realized our answer came down to three things. Together, they explain why we chose embryo adoption.

First, we truly did want our son to have a sibling.

Neither of us has an idealized view of sibling relationships. We know siblings don't automatically become best friends, and adding another child doesn't guarantee our son a lifelong companion. But we also know there is something unique about growing up alongside someone who shares your childhood and, Lord willing, remains beside you long after your parents are gone.

MEN1 added another dimension to that desire. Our son will eventually have to understand and carry a medical reality neither of us would have chosen for him. We can't remove that burden. But if we had the opportunity to give him a sibling to walk through life beside him, we wanted to try.

Adoption, of course, carries its own intricacies, entirely different from those of a medical diagnosis. But both of our children would grow up knowing what it means to carry a part of their story that makes their experience different from many of their peers. Neither could fully understand the other's experience, but perhaps they could grow up knowing they weren't the only ones in our family learning how to hold something complex as part of who they are.

Second, we wanted our son to grow up knowing that family is bigger than shared DNA.

Someday, he may stand where we stood. He may fall in love, get married, and begin thinking about children. And because he carries MEN1, he may have to wrestle with some of the same complicated questions about genetics and parenthood that his dad and I have.

We don't know what he'll decide, and we don't want to decide for him. But we do want the childhood he experiences to show him that biology is not the only way to build a family.

If we welcome a child through embryo adoption, our children won't share genetics. Yet they will share bedtime stories and Christmas mornings, family vacations and inside jokes, arguments in the back seat and countless ordinary Tuesdays. We want both of them to grow up knowing that biology matters, and we intend to honor the genetic relationships that are part of an adopted child's identity. But biology isn't the boundary of family. Love, commitment, and belonging can stretch much farther.

Finally, we wanted to give a child a chance they might otherwise never have had. The more we learned about embryo adoption, the more convinced we became that there were far more embryos waiting for families than families aware that this option even existed. If God was opening this door for us, perhaps He intended our family to make a difference not only for one child, or maybe two, but also for other families simply by sharing the story He was writing.

On April 4, 2026, we submitted our application.

With more questions than answers, more peace than certainty, and no idea what would happen next, we once again took a deep breath and stepped forward in faith, trusting God with whatever He had in store.