Campaign Story

As a woman from a large family full of very strong matriarchs I was often asked how many children I wanted to have. My response was always none. Then I would listen to the usual, “you will change your mind when you get older, or “your hormones may change your mind”, or “just be a woman”. I definitely would prefer not admitting that these people were right, but they are, at least partially. It was meeting my person and becoming more involved in my faith that brought up the desire to be a mother. As life would have it, I met my person when I was thirty and he was thirty-six with a vasectomy. You see, my husband was born with a genetic abnormality that affected his outward appearance and he decided at a young age that he did not want to pass that genetic abnormality on.

In his words, his reasoning for his vasectomy: “I didn’t want to put a kid through my childhood. Kids are cruel. Few opportunities to tease or harass me were missed. I have EEC syndrome, which means I’m missing some fingers and toes. I have a cleft lip/palate. In comparison to the worst cases of EEC I’m quite fortunate, however, kids don’t see it that way. Kids see “different”, and they exploit it….it’s just what they do. So, when I was old enough to have kids of my own, I opted out. I just couldn’t bring myself to inflict the childhood I had onto another human being. So I got snipped and that was that. Only very recently have the opportunities to identify and remove the genetic abnormality materialized and thus presented me (us) with parenthood as a viable option.”

So here we are seven years after meeting each other and we’ve decided that we want to be parents because we feel so strongly that the other will be an amazing parental partner. I think we also, subconsciously, want to provide a child with the childhood that we never had. One full of outward love, openness to personal growth, learning, loving, laughing, and the like. So we decided to adopt. I will not share that story fully, but it was not the right fit for us. The process left us feeling judged, incompetent and saddened by our decision to adopt.
So now, the tricky part: Can we conceive our own child? Turns out in the twenty years since my husband’s vasectomy, geneticists have become highly skilled in identifying genes and in the most layman terms possible: remove them from an embryo. I still have trouble understanding the details but I leave it to the professionals. Ok so next step: what do my reproductive organs look like? Well, turns out they were not meant to naturally conceive. I’m infertile,
which brings us to the reason for this letter. It turns out that the path for us to have children leads to many specialists doing what they do best and us paying upwards of $20,000. I know you are familiar with these stories and I would love to try and tell you why to pick us above all the others, but that is not in my nature. As mentioned, this will be a costly journey for us, so if you feel that our story resonated with you in any way, we would appreciate any grant amount you would like to send to help.