Why Infertile People Don't "Just Adopt"

I used to think "Adoption is too hard." Now I think, "Adoption should happen as rarely as possible."

As a little girl, I desperately wanted to adopt. Not only adopt, but adopt at least five children. I wanted them to be from all different countries, and I would give them a beautiful life in a refurbished pastel pink Victorian, located in a quaint seaside village. A great deal of this desire came from the fact that I had just learned what sex was, and I was terrified of it. I prayed that I could find myself a husband who was happy to refurbish the aforementioned Victorian house with me and agree to never touch each other beyond a cheek kiss. In hindsight, I would have made a fabulous beard.

There was one thing strikingly absent from my adoption fantasy: biological parents. In my fantasies, the babies I adopted were orphans, left on my doorstep or rescued heroically from a glum, overcrowded orphanage. I also never considered how my adopted children—especially those from other countries—might feel about losing ties to their cultures. I never did any play-pretend that involved traumatized adoptees grieving the severed ties with their biological families. I didn’t imagine a biological mother who was too poor to raise her child herself, and pressured by a predatory agency to place for adoption. But hey, I was eight.

Time went by, and eventually I was no longer repulsed by the idea of having sex. I went on to get married, and several years later we started trying for a baby. I still had positive feelings about adoption and always told myself that we would adopt if we couldn’t conceive. At one point, we even discussed forgoing procreation entirely and adopting from the start, but a quick Google search told me that it might cost upward of $40K, so I figured maybe that was something we’d do later, for our second or third child.

But when we couldn’t conceive at all—due to a very rare asymptomatic birth defect my husband had (a missing vas deferens, who would have guessed)—this hypothetical scenario became very real. After the initial shock of discovering his sperm sample yielded “sugar water,” I drafted up a literal pros and cons list, detailing IVF (since other fertility interventions wouldn’t work for our condition), not having children at all, and adopting. At first, I unsurprisingly leaned toward adoption. I didn’t have a particular preference for my genetics or race, so it made sense to me. But then I started researching, and everything changed.

(One quick note: my husband can make sperm, the sperm cells just don’t enter the semen. So IVF in our case still meant biological children; his sperm would just have to be extracted via needle under anesthesia. He called it the “Testicle Extractor.” Sorry to all the men who just had to read that!)

Before our infertility diagnosis, I would hear about other couples doing IVF instead of adopting and I always wondered why they didn’t adopt (luckily, I never directly said it, because I knew it was hurtful.) But I also had major questions about adoption in general. After all, I heard there were “so many kids in need of homes” but somehow, a “long waiting list to adopt.” I heard that adopting was free, that the government even paid you to do it, but that it could also cost $50,000 or more. And I heard that adoption was altruistic, that adoptees were fortunate to be “chosen” but also that adoption was a traumatic wound. How could all of these things simultaneously be true?

After researching adoption thoroughly, from the perspective of the adoptive parent, biological parent, and adoptee, I realized it was not something I would pursue (and I’ll get into why in a bit.) But I was shocked at the vitriol I received for this choice, even though in my case it was not at all motivated by a preference for my own genetics. And by the way, I think it’s actually fine to have a preference to pass on your own genes- that just wasn’t the driving factor for me.

I had just started CHH (fun fact, I started CHH primarily to cope with the stress of infertility and losing my job at the time, with no intention to monetize)—and I announced the beginning of my IVF journey on Facebook, where most of my webcomics lived at that point. The goal was to help other infertile couples feel less alone. Instead, I was met with a barrage of antinatalist sentiment about how I was a “selfish bitch” (yes, real quote) for not “just adopting.” Someone else told me that if I did adopt “You better not adopt a baby. There are far more teenagers in need of a home.” At the time, I was vulnerable and thin-skinned, and I capitulated, telling them that I was considering fostering teenagers when I was older and had more parenting experience (this was true, and I’m still not ruling it out.) The mob doubled down, telling me that I needed to do this now, and prioritize teenagers in foster care over my “designer baby.” I asked them how many teenagers they had adopted, and they said, “This isn’t about me, it’s about you.” How convenient!

Others expressed deep concern for my personal finances. Their argument was that if I could afford IVF (I actually had it covered by insurance for the most part) that I could be using that money to help a child in need, which I guess means that anyone with any amount of money in the bank is required to give it away? I don’t know.

One striking thing about all these comments: they’re never directed at fertile people. Infertility is not a prerequisite for adoption, and adoption is not a cure for infertility. If you assume all adoption is altruistic (which is a flimsy assumption!) then everyone who doesn’t adopt is doing something wrong. That includes people who have their own biological children without medical intervention. Why didn’t they forgo procreation and adopt instead? And why don’t childfree people adopt? Sure, they may not “want” children, but I thought it wasn’t about what we wanted! If this is truly a crisis that infertile people are required to fix, then why isn’t everyone required to help?

Of course, the people who say this are usually people who never want kids at all, so the desire for kids (let alone biological kids) feels frivolous to them (I had one lovely woman compare my desire for children to the desire to get a BBL- deeply offensive that anyone would think that I would need a BBL.) Alternatively, they are people who already successfully had biological children and are now holding infertile people to a standard to which they’d never hold themselves. Babies for me, not for thee. I encountered one such person who said the quiet part out loud: “I didn’t adopt because I could have kids naturally. But IVF is unnatural.” (To make matters more perplexing, this person was not religiously opposed to IVF—he was an atheist—he just hated anything “unnatural.”)

I also want to point out that despite my concerns about adoption, from all perspectives, I’m not “anti adoption.” I do not hate adoptive parents. There are situations (albeit rare) when it’s the best outcome, and I know that there are great adoptive parents out there. The main point of writing this article isn’t to say that nobody should ever adopt, but rather that people should be more informed of the reality of adoption before demanding that infertile people adopt. I also hope to provide more information to people who are genuinely, non-judgmentally curious about why adoption isn’t more common.

But anyway—I should probably explain what I discovered in my own research that I think answers the question: “Why don’t infertile people just adopt?”

Here’s why.