With the overturning of Roe vs. Wade, I have seen many posts on Facebook and news sites. I want to share my family’s story to add another perspective to the discussion.

It has been tough to read all the Facebook posts about how “some lady” has it so hard that she has to have an abortion when our daughter is the poster child for that situation. 

Our birth mom was facing financial hardships, trying to raise three other children as a single parent, leaning on friends and family to help support her and her kids with yet another on the way. My daughter’s father —we do not know his name —was abusive. 

If you listen to most social media posts, our daughter should have been aborted. That line of thinking makes me weak in the knees. 

In the current discussion, it is pro-choice or pro-life. However, no one seems to think about the compromise of adoption. Adoption lets the mother not worry about providing for the child and keeps an abortion from happening.

I want to encourage everyone to think about adoption.

Here is our story

Our story starts almost five years ago after my wife and I discovered we had only a slight chance of having our own children. This destroyed us. 

The thought of being unable to participate in having children sent both of us into depression. I tried to stay positive, but this affected my wife immensely. It broke her spirit. It was tough for me to see the woman I love so distraught.

While fertility treatments looked to be in our future, that thought seemed to drive my wife into a deeper state of depression.

The first time I saw her smile in six to eight months was when I brought up the topic of adoption. So we began our adoption journey.

We immediately found out that adoptions are far more complex than we imagined. Here are a few things we learned:

• Adoptions cost between $35,000 and $45,000 in Missouri. This covers medical bills, adoption agency fees, paperwork fees, extensive background searches, home inspection fees, court fees, lawyer fees, on top of reimbursing the mother for any costs. We were fortunate. We spent just over $32,000 during our adoption, not counting the costs associated with adding a child to our home. My wife is fantastic and spent years working extremely hard to help raise the money necessary. Even with all that extra work, we had to borrow money to make our adoption possible. 

• We discovered an unfortunate fact. The foster care system is not designed for adoptions. Their goal is to keep family together, which is good. This means that in extreme cases, children are not adopted until much later in life. We wanted to experience as much of a child’s life as possible. So, the foster system would not be the right fit for us. 

• More families want to adopt than mothers are willing to put their child up for adoption. I don’t understand why more women facing an unexpected pregnancy don’t choose adoption. 

• Adoptions take a long time. While we were fortunate to find a birth mother. The paperwork side and court issues took much longer than we expected. It took us eight months in the court system plus another three months to finish the paperwork. As a result, we did not have the legal paperwork to be considered our daughter’s parents until she was 11 months old. This prevented us from getting insurance for our daughter, as well as several other paperwork issues. We are still arguing with the IRS even after two years.

• You have zero privacy during an adoption. We had five or six home inspections by our adoption agency and the state. After we returned home with our daughter, the state had people in our house within 13 hours to inspect it. You are expected to have a perfect home…not really, but you get the point. Little things that most normal parents would not bother checking had to be checked at our house. 

• Adoptions are also very emotional. We had several ups and downs. We received several phone calls saying the adoption agent was talking to an expectant mother “Are you interested in this situation?” We even spoke to a pregnant mother and later was informed that she lost the child before deciding to whom she would give the baby. 

While we were excited to talk to our birth mother for the first time, we had to understand that we might not get the results we wanted. The two weeks after our first meeting was one of the most suspenseful times of our life. 

• We were also told not to prepare for a child because the process could take years and no one wants to look at an empty crib for that long. This made preparing for a child stressful. We had five weeks and one day from being told we would be parents to when we held our daughter in our arms. 

While our adoption was stressful and exciting, it would have been nothing without our birth mother. 

Here is what I really want to say, and it is the hard, emotional part.

Our birth mother chose more than just adoption; she is probably the strongest person I have ever met.

I can not understand the worries or stress related to being a single lady who is scared, missing a support system, or facing abuse.  

Words can not describe the joy in our hearts because of the choice she made. The knowledge that I am a parent today not because of anything I did but because of one young lady who we had never met. A young lady who did not just give this gift to my wife and me, she gave this gift to our entire family. 

Her decision made grandparents and great grandparents, aunts and uncles — all of which have spent the last two years spoiling and loving a little one. Every smile, laugh, giggle, and tear of joy is all because of one young lady who made the decision to offer her child up for adoption. 

I can not wait until our daughter is old enough to understand her adoption so I can introduce her to her birth mother and siblings.

I beg and plead with any woman facing the uncertainty of an unplanned pregnancy, please, please think about adoption. Make someone’s world a better place. 

Hopefully, with changes to abortion laws, lawmakers will review and find ways to streamline adoption.