God Coincidences

One of my favorite kinds of testimonies to hear is what I call God coincidences. I see them as one of the few truly useful elements of hindsight. They involve looking back at a situation or circumstance and recognizing the ways God orchestrated the exact right thing to happen, such as a particular conversation occurring at the perfect time, or some other turn of fate that can only be attributed to God. Looking back, I can trace how we discovered embryo adoption to two seemingly unrelated relationships that were already part of our lives.

The first is that one of my closest childhood friends happens to be an embryologist. Because of her, I was fairly familiar with IVF long before Jacob's diagnosis. We had spent many hours discussing her work because I found it fascinating. Our conversations often wandered beyond the science into the ethical questions her field raises. Surprisingly, I found those conversations easy to relate to through my own work as an engineer for a prime defense contractor. On the surface, embryology and missile defense don't seem to have much in common, but the moral questions are remarkably similar.

Both involve life and death. Both can make people look at you a little funny when you explain what you do. Both require holding onto the bigger picture to navigate the difficult realities of the day-to-day work. And both only exist because we live in a world that is deeply broken.

After Jacob and our son's diagnoses, I called her to let her know everything that had happened and to tell her where we were in the process of trying to figure out what came next. Somewhere in that conversation, she asked, "Have you ever heard of embryo donation?"

That question led me to remember the second God coincidence that had happened years earlier, though I didn't recognize its significance until much later.

Before our son was born, one of the primary ways we spent time with Jacob's family was through Auburn football. We had season tickets and made several trips each fall, tailgating with the same group of families before the games.

On our last trip before our son was born, one of the women in the group told us the story of another family there. The woman was expecting her third child. What made her story so remarkable was that her first two children had come into their family through embryo adoption. They were genetic siblings who she had carried, delivered, and loved from the very beginning, but they were not genetically related to either her or her husband.

I remember being completely amazed.

I had watched her go through her second pregnancy without ever realizing the unique story behind it. Then, after years of infertility and being told she would never conceive on her own, she unexpectedly became pregnant naturally with this miracle baby. I was simply overjoyed for her. At the time, though, I filed her story away as one of those remarkable things that was beautiful for someone else.

When my friend asked whether we had heard of embryo donation, I assumed it was the same as embryo adoption. I told her I had and that it wasn’t a consideration for us. While the two are closely related, they are different. Embryo donation generally takes place through an IVF clinic and is viewed primarily as a medical procedure. Embryo adoption usually occurs through an adoption agency and treats the process much more like a traditional adoption, just one that begins about nine months earlier.

At that point, I couldn't imagine willingly putting pregnancy back on the table. I wasn't interested in the medications or hormone treatments required to make it happen, especially given the health complications I had experienced during my first pregnancy. She completely understood. She encouraged us as we pursued infant adoption and simply said that if I ever changed my mind, she would be happy to talk more about embryo donation.

But as the doors of infant adoption slowly closed, I found myself reconsidering the whole embryo adoption/donation idea.

The more I thought about it, the more I realized something had shifted. Months earlier, before Jacob's diagnosis, we had decided not to pursue adoption because we didn't want fear to dictate the shape of our family. Now I found myself asking the same question again. Had anything actually changed? Context for sure, but not a whole lot else. If we had been willing to accept many of the unknowns and challenges that came with infant adoption, what were a few needles and months of feeling less than wonderful? As much as I had not too reluctantly let go of the idea of another pregnancy after Jacob's diagnosis, I found myself wondering whether I had dismissed it too quickly.

The more I researched embryo adoption, the more everything seemed to fall into place. The timelines were considerably shorter. I could provide the prenatal environment for our child. We wouldn’t face the incredibly complex feelings that could arise if an expectant mother ultimately decided to parent. We would receive detailed medical histories for the embryo's genetic family. And perhaps most surprisingly, I discovered there was a tremendous need.

Current estimates suggest more than one million frozen embryos are in storage in the United States alone. Many of those embryos belong to families who have completed their own family and are faced with the difficult decision of what to do with the embryos that remain. For the first time in weeks, I found myself genuinely excited about a possibility.

I decided to look up the woman we knew from Auburn to see if she might be willing to talk with me about her family's experience. Instead, I found her blog. In many ways, it was exactly what I needed. Her willingness to write honestly about the questions she had wrestled with—both with God and within herself—gave voice to thoughts I hadn't yet been able to articulate. Reading her story helped me begin to imagine what this path might look like for us.

I don't know if she has any idea how much her willingness to share her story affected me. In many ways, she's one of the reasons I am writing this now. Someone else's raw honesty gave me the courage to keep searching for my own.