Here are some basic facts about adopting: If filling out yearly tax returns is enough to give you a headache or drive you to drink, don’t even try. Any 15-year-old can get knocked up and keep her kid, but you will have to be fingerprinted, get appropriate scores on personality tests, and discuss your marital and sexual life with strangers before you will be granted the permission to raise one. If your dog barks at the social worker, you may be doomed.
Irregular hormones were a fact of life in my family. My mother and father were together for 11 years of unprotected sex before I came along. My cousin, who suffers from the same condition, underwent years of fertility treatments before finally giving birth to a daughter. As my 31st birthday approached, David and I threw away the birth control pills. As the year waned and I had failed to menstruate, much less ovulate, we found ourselves taking the next step along a well-worn path: the appointment with a fertility specialist.
Adoption continued to beckon, no longer quietly from a corner but with a bullhorn, proclaiming itself the surest, sanest option. Everyone, however, had opinions: “You’re young, there’s a good chance the drugs will work,” said my former professor. “With adoption, you never know what you’ll get.” Women friends murmured approvingly that I was “so strong,” but in the next breath expressed horror that this might someday happen to them, and doubted they could ever be truly happy with an adopted child.
As China’s pull grew stronger, more skeptics crawled out of the woodwork. An older, divorced friend disapproved of middle-class whites going to take Chinese children when the capitalist United States was “responsible” for China’s problems anyway; an old high school friend cried in alarm, “But aren’t you worried about bad genetics and past traumas?” The doctor and nurse, who were themselves starting down the road to in vitro, said only, “Adoption isn’t for everyone.” Meanwhile, those aiming to be supportive crooned, “Oriental babies are so beautiful and smart,” as though no plain Mei with an average IQ had ever emerged from a Chinese womb. One friend’s enthusiastic mother asked if we planned to “teach the baby English.” A lifetime of education loomed before us.
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We would be traveling to China with nine other couples. Our dossiers were sent out in February 2000, and after nearly five months of scrambling to consulates for paperwork and rabidly cleaning our house for Pam’s visit, the matter was finally out of our hands. Somewhere in China the fate of ten American couples and their future daughters would be decided. Pam said we should expect to wait seven months for a referral, another two before travel–a mirror of pregnancy’s span. Of course these dates were only approximate, she said. We did not hear the warnings, 20 aspiring parents with hopes welling so high they plugged our ears. We would have our daughters before Christmas.
After approval is given–if it’s given–a cover sheet is created, which includes the applicants’ ages, income, and educational levels. This sheet may be the best predictor of what child a family receives: young and healthy, or older with special needs. Dossiers are then sent to the second document review department, which is in charge of matching the huge stack of applicants with candidates from the even larger stack of waiting children. This traditionally took two or three months, but now, due to a sharp rise in the number of applicants, the entire process from translation to matching can take 14 months, a wait that, for prospective parents with little idea of what is going on–not even whether they’ve been approved–can be excruciating.
While grief over infertility cuts across boundaries of nation, class, and race, given the prohibitive cost of fertility treatments many women have no choice but to simply get over it. Even Americans with good insurance may find extensive intervention unrealistic: the medical attention required is so time-consuming that those vigorously pursuing treatment often either work part-time or quit altogether. Those who go furthest with these treatments, then (and are therefore most scarred by their failure), tend to be white and well-off, that segment of the U.S. population most accustomed to getting what it wants. Experience has taught them that hard work and desire or prayer inevitably pay off. Infertility represents the first time in their highly productive lives that they cannot produce.
