We both dreamed of being parents.
Our dream came true when we got pregnant on our honeymoon in October 2015. About 6 weeks later we lost our baby, and then struggled to conceive again for nearly 2 years. When the 2-year mark was approaching, there was an emergency situation where a baby girl needed a family and home. After many prayers and discussions together asking God for direction, we made the decision to open our home to her with the intent of adopting her. Long story short, there was another family that stepped in to help her before us. While we desperately wanted it to be us, we knew God had other plans for her.
Two weeks after this, we found out we were pregnant! We welcomed our beautiful daughter in May 2018. Two days after she was born, she was airlifted to a hospital and stayed in the NICU for a few days while they ran a series of tests on her. At nine days old, she was diagnosed with cystic fibrosis, which we found to be a genetic lung condition. We also learned that it is dangerous for people with CF to be around each other because they carry unique bacteria in their lungs that can be harmful to each other.
Knowing this and that it is genetic, we decided to pursue a calling we both felt even before we were married – adoption! We picked out the agency that we planned to work with to pursue domestic adoption and continued to complete our adoption home study. As we continued down the domestic adoption path, we felt God was wanting to redirect us. We prayed continuously, started researching, and discovered the Snowflakes Embryo Adoption Program. This was exactly where He wanted us to be! Each member of the Snowflakes team that helped us successfully complete our embryo adoption was kind, helpful and expertly led us to complete the program. We were matched with a placing family within two weeks and adopted two embryos.
We transferred one of our embryos shortly after they arrived at our clinic, and unfortunately, our first transfer did not result in a pregancy. We took time to mourn our loss. We were committed to both embryos that we adopted and scheduled our second FET. With lots of prayers and trust in the Lord we transferred our second embryo, and ten days later found out we were pregnant! In September of 2022, we welcomed our beautiful frozen miracle, Rayna, home!
Kevin and I were married in late spring of 2015. Going into our marriage, we knew that Kevin suffered from azoospermia; having a sperm count of practically zero, and having doctors tell us that there was a less than 2% chance of us naturally conceiving. Nevertheless, we knew that we were destined to be parents.
After six years of trying naturally, as well as becoming established in our marriage as just the two of us, we heard about embryo adoption from a family friend. We had never heard of this—so after a quick trip down Google Road, we came across the organization Nightlight Christian Adoptions and the Snowflakes Embryo Adoption Program, which we thought might be right for us. After calling to get more information about the process, we felt the love from the very first conversation we had over the phone, and knew that it was the right decision for us to move forward.
Kevin and I both come from moderately big families, so we knew that our “perfect family” would have (hopefully!) five kids. We knew that no matter how they came to us, we would love and cherish them because God brought them into our lives. Our embryo donors that we matched with through Snowflakes Program were fantastic and we were blessed with 11 embryos!
After all the tests, doctors’ visits, and exams, we were ready to implant. I was terrified; I knew I wanted to be a mom—that I would do everything in my power to protect, teach, and guide this little baby. However, waiting those two weeks for the blood test to see if all our patience had paid off was agonizing. Finally, in September 2022, we FINALLY had our positive test! We were elated!
January 2023 we found out that were we having a baby girl, but that she was looking on the smaller side… Panic started setting in… so many prayers were offered to God to help protect her. The week of Valentine’s Day, I was admitted into the hospital with preeclampsia for monitoring and bed rest. My wonderful team of doctors decided that I would come in 3-4 times a week for monitoring, ultrasounds, and blood work to make sure that everything was moving forward nicely.
March 2023—what should have been a normal Friday appointment turned out to be anything but; as I was hooked up to the monitor, our baby girl’s heart rate dropped from 138 to 60. After watching the monitor for a bit and continuing to see her heart rate rise and drop, my OB said, “We are going to deliver right now.” (What?!)
We rushed to the hospital. We were at 31 weeks… All I kept thinking was, “She’s too small!” We had an emergency C-section, and that is when I finally heard it—the small but mighty cry of my baby girl. She was perfect!
After 55 days in the NICU, we were finally able to take her home. She had made HUGE strides; her doctors and nurses were constantly surprised at how well she did. They nicknamed her the “easy baby.”
She may be small, but she is a fighter, and she is everything we have been dreaming of our whole eight years of marriage! I thank God for helping protect her and make her strong. I thank God for the amazing staff at Snowflakes, and I thank God for the wonderful people who allowed us the opportunity to become parents through their donations! You have given us the most amazing gift!
This story was originally published in The Philadelphia Inquirer. It has been edited for length and clarity.
It was November 2021, and their future children — their “beans,” Hannah and Adam called them — were in a refrigerated truck on the way from a West Coast fertility clinic. The six embryos, produced by another couple during IVF procedures, had been in deep freeze for almost a decade.
The couple was adopting them, hoping that one or more of those frozen embryos, once transferred to Hannah’s uterus, would become the children they’d been envisioning for years.
Adam and Hannah were kids themselves when they met — 10 and 11 years old, chasing around the yard outside Grace Church at Willow Valley. “Everything started with a friendship,” Adam says. “By the time we were 17, 18 years old, we were in love.”
Hannah’s kindness was a powerful draw: the way her friends came to her for counsel, the way lacrosse teammates nicknamed her “Mama” for her wisdom.
And for her? “What girl can resist a guy with a guitar?” she says. “What I grew to appreciate is that Adam is very wise and discerning, much more patient than I am, very funny and easygoing.”
They managed a long-distance relationship while Hannah attended college in Virginia; Adam stayed home for Lancaster Bible College. The summer before Hannah’s senior year — her mother had died several months earlier — Adam arranged a scavenger hunt near Willow Valley Duck Pond, a path marked with cards for each of the 10 years they had known each other.
He’d had a ring made with the diamond from Hannah’s mother’s ring. That’s when she broke down and wept.
They married at Grace Church, where Adam is now pastor. “A lot of people, when they say ‘I do,’ in some ways they’re saying it to a stranger,” Adam says. “For us, it was: I know this person.”
At the time, they were limping along on part-time jobs, so cash-strapped that just after the wedding, they tore open the cards they’d received so they’d have enough money to pay the rent and honeymoon at Adam’s family house near Penn State.
They’d already talked about children: a definite yes.
But nature equivocated. After trying for a year on their own, they consulted a fertility practice. Hannah became pregnant after one intrauterine insemination, then miscarried at three weeks. That was in late 2019, just before the pandemic.
Adam remembers lockdown as also being a time of healing. “I would get up as the sun was coming up and go on walks and spend time in prayer and try to process what had happened.”
They tried four more IUIs without success — "The rollercoaster of hope and then disappointment, all the physical things, all the tests, and medications,” Hannah says. At one appointment, a nurse mentioned embryo adoption; that same day, Adam read an article about the process on the Gospel Coalition’s website.
He was intrigued. Hannah was sold. “I thought: OK, yep, that’s what we’re going to do,” she says. “We wanted to be able to start our family with a baby.” And Adam realized that adopting an embryo — one that would otherwise remain frozen or eventually be destroyed — was in alignment with their values.
They learned about Snowflakes, a program of Nightlight Christian Adoptions. Like some agencies that foster open adoption, Snowflakes’ “placing families” choose the adoptive parents, then those parents can say yes or no to the match. A fertility clinic examines the frozen embryos and reviews the biological parents’ medical history to ensure the best chance of success.
Hannah and Adam needed a home study, a profile book, background checks, and medical exams. They liked the idea that they would learn about their future child’s genetic and family history, and that they could even meet the biological parents.
“We believe that God has created each and every individual and has a special plan, that he orchestrates our lives,” says Adam. “Every single one of us has a beautiful story.”
They received news of a match in August 2021. Next was the “contracts phase,” hashing out exactly what kind of communication they would have with the biological parents; in their case, it consists of a minimum of yearly photos and updates. “But at some point, if everybody agrees, we’d be open to a phone call, a video chat, or a meeting,” Hannah says.
It was challenging to explain what they were doing to friends and family — the apparent conundrum of adopting and being pregnant. Adam’s mother commented, “This is like sci-fi,” and others just looked puzzled: “Wait, how does this work?”
The transfer happened at the end of January 2022, with the first embryo that physicians thawed. Right after the procedure, the couple stopped for a spontaneous IKEA trip, with Adam reassuring himself aloud the entire time: “We’re just going to walk around; she’s going to be fine.”
At 10 days, a blood test flagged good news. Hannah’s HCG levels were high. She was pregnant. The next nine months were relatively easy: very little morning sickness, and a series of early ultrasounds that let them hear the heartbeat at six weeks.
“It sounded like a train,” Hannah says. “Chugga chugga chugga. He was still just a little bean at that point.”
She was due Oct. 13. But on the 6th, the baby failed a non-stress test; at the hospital, it turned out Hannah had preeclampsia. “They said, ‘Guess what? You’re not leaving this hospital until your baby’s born.’ I got induced that evening.”
She’d been pushing for two hours when a doctor said, “One more push, with a little help from the obstetric vacuum, and if this doesn’t work, we’re going to a C-section.”
That was all the motivation Hannah needed. Canaan arrived at 5:12 p.m., the 960th Snowflakes baby to be born. But reality didn’t truly sink in until the next day. Canaan is the promised land in the Old Testament. “It came as the blessing after a time of barrenness and emptiness,” Adam says.
“It dawned on us: All that waiting, all that loss, all that disappointment, now that’s done. The reward of persevering through all that is now in our arms. Incredible.”
When we could not get pregnant on our own, we turned to IVF, but after six rounds, it was clear that our genetic material does not create viable embryos. With each successive cycle, our physician was able to retrieve eggs and create embryos, but before the embryos reached five days old, they stopped growing.
We even traveled to the best of the best in New York City, rented an apartment there for a month, and that doctor tried implanting the three-day-old embryos, thinking maybe they would continue to grow, but that was also unsuccessful.
Several doctors suggested an egg donor, but we did not want to do that. We thought about traditional adoption, but we wanted to experience pregnancy, so we put that idea on hold.
Then in May 2020, friends of ours told us about their friends who had just had a baby through embryo adoption. During our seven years of trying to have children, this is something we had never heard of. Both of us immediately knew that this was what we were supposed to do.
Legally speaking, what we did is not considered adoption, but as attorneys, we feel like the law has not caught up to the science. The normal contract for transferring ownership of embryos is not much different than buying a car!
The agency we went through, Snowflakes Embryo Adoption, adds many steps that resemble a traditional adoption. We had to complete a home study, go through background checks, and have medical examinations. We like to say we just adopted our children nine months earlier than most people do.
The cost of embryo adoption was about the same as traditional IVF. While we paid a lot for medical intervention during the IVF process, most of the expenses of embryo adoption involved the necessary legal paperwork.
Once Snowflakes approved us, we filled out a profile that shared information about our lives and included our photos. Then the agency shared our profile with some of the people who donated embryos. The donors get to decide whether they are comfortable with potential parents. Everyone's privacy was taken very seriously.
Part of our file included our preferences regarding any potential relationship with the donors. We put in our profile that we intended to be open and transparent with our children's journey. We consulted our friends, who are traditional adoptive parents, and they told us this was the best option. We wanted to make sure that if our kids wanted to meet their biological relatives, they would have that choice.
Many of the people donating embryos are doing so because their circumstances have changed. The first couple we matched with had children through IVF, but because of medical complications, they could not have another pregnancy. They transferred their remaining four embryos to us, but, sadly, while one of those resulted in pregnancy, we miscarried early.
As sad as that made us, we were also comforted by the knowledge that we could, in fact, get pregnant, so we once again requested to be matched, and the next family transferred five embryos to us.
The next step was very much like IVF. Success requires the woman's cycle to be at the right time. It is sort of like tricking your body into welcoming implantation. We were thrilled that both embryos were implanted, and we were having twins.
Pregnancy was an exciting time. I was even thankful that I threw up because my doctor said that was a good sign. There were no real cravings, and my doctor was pleasantly surprised at how easy pregnancy was for me, particularly because of my advanced age.
We could not love these children any more if they were biologically ours. Days go by without a single thought about their being adopted, honestly. These are our children.
When our babies were born, our names went on their birth certificates. There was no other paperwork needed. No going before a judge, none of that. They were fully our children from their first breath.
Dalton Rice Miller carries the maiden names of his great-grandmothers. Dalton is Mary Leah’s grandmother’s maiden name and Rice is Rodney’s grandmother’s maiden name.
Mary Elizabeth Miller also carries family names. Mary appears in each generation on Mary Leah’s side of the family. It was also important to Mary Leah that she go by a double name as Mary Leah and her mother go by a Mary double name. Elizabeth is a generational name on Rodney’s side of the family and his grandmother’s middle name. We also found her name fitting as the Lord led Mary Leah to Luke Chapter 1 early in our journey and the story of Elizabeth and Zechariah. The verse that stuck out to Mary Leah appears when Mary visits Elizabeth who is pregnant with John the Baptist. The verse is Luke 1:45 “Blessed is she who has believed the Lord would fulfill His promises to her.”
Mary Leah has held onto this verse in faith for years, believing that she would become pregnant. As such, Mary Elizabeth’s name honors not only our families but also is a tribute to the verse that the Lord gave to Mary Leah during their battle with infertility.
Like many young girls, I looked forward to that day when I could be married and have children. As an adult, I fell in love with a man that had already been married once before and did already have a son. Although this wasn’t the situation I necessarily dreamed of as a child, I saw my future husband as the wonderful father he was and knew he would be just as wonderful with any children we shared together.
Once we were married we knew it was time to continue growing our family. After a few years of unsuccessful attempts at getting pregnant, I got that devastating call from my doctor letting me know I would not be able to have any biological children due to premature menopause. This news was pretty devastating at first, but I do have a very strong belief system and know that all things work together for good. Although God had closed one door, I knew He would open another.
We thought about egg donation. After looking into it, we both knew it was just not the path meant for us. My husband was very leery of adoption, but I convinced him to attend an informational meeting with me. Many of his adoption hesitancies were validated at this meeting and I started to feel defeated. I loved my step-son, but would I really never have a child to call my own? Would I resent my husband for having something I couldn’t have? Would he resent me if I pushed him into something he wasn’t comfortable with? So many thoughts, so many doubts swirling in my mind.
Neither of us had ever heard of embryo adoption. At the very end of our adoption meeting, they handed out a pamphlet explaining Snowflakes Embryo Adoption. Together we agreed that this path made the most sense to us. We immediately took action and started the somewhat long process to get home study approved and matched with our embryos. The next steps weren’t “easy” by any means and we spent a lot of time in prayer, a good amount of time being fearful and unsure, time spent learning to communicate our thoughts and feelings with each other, and quite a bit of time spent waiting on God’s timing and God’s plan.
We did experience a miscarriage after our first transfer. It was sad to have hope and then to lose it relatively quickly, but we weren’t ready to give up. Our precious John - snowflake #465 - was the last of 3 embryos we’d been gifted through embryo adoption and he was a strong, spirited, healthy boy born two years after we’d started our Snowflake's journey. I’m thankful for the network of Snowflake families that sent us encouragement along the way and brought us hope especially during the discouraging times. I’m so grateful for our embryo donors and the path that brought us together. On another exciting level, our experience adopting through Snowflakes helped us feel confident enough to adopt traditionally as well. Five years after we had our “snowflake” we welcomed another baby boy by way of a domestic adoption. We are abundantly blessed and grateful for all of our boys and the path that brought them home to us.
If God has closed a door in your life, don’t stop looking for the new door that he has opened for you.
My daughters keep their baby dolls in the freezer to keep them safe, just like they were. And I wouldn’t have it any other way.
I remember the pain of infertility so vividly. There was a time when I thought I wouldn’t be able to continue my career as a sonographer. Scanning pregnant women everyday felt unfair. I ached to relate to my patients. I wondered if I would ever know what the first trimester was like, how it felt to experience a baby move inside of you, the magic of birth, the chaos of motherhood.
My husband and I were young. Doctors were hopeful. But after three years of trying everything from pills to injections, an IUI, dozens of supplements, acupuncture, and two rounds of IVF resulting in one poor quality embryo, we felt like we had exhausted all of our options.
Our Reproductive Endocrinologist met with us over the phone since we were on vacation. He told us he was just as shocked as we were -- that on top of PCOS, a polyp removal and endometriosis, I likely had poor egg quality. We could continue to throw money at IVF in hopes we could find one good egg, or we could explore adoption or embryo adoption.
We spent the remainder of our vacation processing and researching our options. A couple weeks later, I found myself calling Nightlight. I remember our phone call bringing me hope. We already had some diversity in the family through domestic adoption of our two nieces. My husband thought pregnancy would be a great way for him to bond and we both thought it would be good for me to experience carrying a pregnancy, especially given my job. I was guarded as it would mean more chances of experiencing more negative pregnancy tests. But we were thrilled when we chose Nightlight, and I started to hope again. Eager to begin, we sped through the requirements in two months. We were matched quickly and found out I was pregnant with one embryo after our first transfer of two.
When I met our first daughter, it was a redemptive experience for me. Now I’m chasing around her biological sister, too. While the heartache of infertility will always be part of me, I'm grateful for the path it led my husband and me to. I got to experience all those things I hoped for, and now I'm knee-deep in the chaos of motherhood filled with gratitude for Nightlight and our embryo adoption journey.
Right from the beginning of our married life, we started trying to bring children into our family. Everything was going joyfully, and our life flowed smoothly with work, friends, relatives, and travel. However, the children were not coming. In the first two years of marriage, we weren't too worried about the fact that the children had not arrived yet. However, at some point we realized something was wrong and we started to do some medical tests to understand any issues we had with fertility.
The doctors said everything was okay for both of us. At 42 years old, a job offer came from California and we decided to move to the USA from Italy. Once in the USA, a doctor suggested we try IVF. When it didn’t work, we decided to not proceed further. We felt that was not our path, and that God had something else in mind for us. In parallel, we looking into information on adoption in both the USA and Italy.
During our research, we came across embryo adoption and the Snowflakes Program; discovering a world we didn't know existed. After more research, we decided embryo adoption was our path. We had always been open to traditional adoption, but when we learned that embryo adoption existed, something just clicked and felt right for us. We wanted to experience pregnancy and birth. Embryo adoption seemed like such an interesting and unexplored path to parenthood. We liked the idea of being a part of an amazing and exciting adoption program. These embryos deserve an opportunity to grow, live and be loved. As we read in an interview: “Man can put the pieces of science together to form an embryo and freeze it, but God puts life and soul into these children, just as He does with any other child.”
In February 2021 we started our journey with the Snowflakes Program. We started with the completion of our home study, then we waited for a match and we prayed a lot. Fortunately, one day a precious family chose us as an adoptive family for their 6 embryos. We were so excited and full of joy for this opportunity. We started the medications early and we proceeded to thaw three embryos. Unfortunately, one embryo didn't survive the thaw and the other two continue to grow. We didn't give up. We took time to grieve and prepared for another transfer with the three remaining embryos. On May 17th, 2022, we had our second transfer of two embryos. On June 22nd, we discovered we were pregnant with our baby boy. Happiness, gratitude, hope, joy, faith; we felt an explosion of feelings that we cannot describe. This has been an amazing journey that brought us a wonderful child. The plan of God is now clear. He accompanied us along the way and He will continue to be with our family throughout our lives.
Dear Sweet Son,
We hope you will grow to know how much you are loved, how much you were (& are) wanted and how special you are to so very many people.
We were excited to start a family together and we never imagined the ten years of obstacles we would have to go through to finally get to you – you are more than worth every one of those challenges. You won’t understand all of this now, but here is how our journey went . . .
It started with fertility medications, multiple intrauterine insemination (IUI), then two failed in vitro fertilizations (IVF). Then a miracle happened and Mommy got pregnant twice within a year without any help from doctors! However, both pregnancies ended in early miscarriage and we were so hurt and confused. Why would God allow us to get so excited, only for us to become so broken-hearted?
We couldn’t afford another IVF procedure so I began to use a fertility monitor, started regular fertility acupuncture, drank horrible (looking, smelling and tasting) Chinese herbs, scheduled chiropractic care to help with fertility, tried fertility self-massage and yoga, and finally tried an at-home IUI kit that we stumbled upon. Sometime in the middle of all of this we became licensed foster caregivers but had to allow our licensure to expire at the end of the year in order to work with another organization to work towards foster adoption. Unfortunately, the foster adoption organization was shutting down just as we wanted to get started, so we decided to go the traditional adoption route and adopt from the Philippines. Just as we started to attend the adoption classes and filled out the paperwork, we were told that the Philippines Program was shutting down.
Because we had some money saved up, we felt a little nudge to try one more round of IVF. This ended with another disappointment because we couldn’t even complete the process because none of our little embryos made it past day three and couldn’t be transferred. The doctor suggested that we use an egg donor. Little did we know that this was actually the beginning of a huge blessing.
An egg donor was not something we had ever considered and we were not very comfortable with the thought of it. One day I was flipping through a copy of Focus on the Family, and I came across a page that talked about the Snowflake Embryo Adoption Program. We could adopt a baby (an embryo) AND experience an actual pregnancy? There was no doubt that this was all God and our hope and excitement were restored!
Fast-forward and here we are three and a half years later, continuing to thank God for you. How exciting life has been with you here and what an amazing Christmas season this has been, being able to watch you marvel in all of the wonder and joy of the holidays.
Son, when you get older we pray that you will be proud to share your amazing miracle story with others to give them hope and so they can learn about Nightlight and the wonderful Snowflakes Embryo Adoption Program that we are so grateful for. Your story is a story of hope, perseverance, love and support from our amazing family and friends, and most importantly, the goodness of our faithful Heavenly Father . You are our sweet, not-so-little boy, who will always be our Snowflake and we are so smitten by you.
We love you “twenty times” and can’t stop giving you “huggies & kisses”.
Love,
Mommy & Daddy
As a young newly married couple, we were so excited to start a family. But God had other plans when we were diagnosed with unexplained infertility. We grieved this loss of our dream, but we strongly felt that we were called to adopt. After exploring different adoption avenues, we were introduced to the Snowflakes program at Nightlight Christian Adoptions. We were matched with an incredible family and adopted their precious embryos. We transferred two embryos in March 2016, and our twin boys Samuel and Judah were born in November 2016. These boys have been an incredible gift and blessing to our lives and to the lives of our family. We are so thankful to our matching family and to the amazing staff of Nightlight Christian Adoptions!
My husband’s favorite number is 27.
We met in college so the questions were “How many credits are you taking this semester?” 27. “How much did you spend on groceries?” $27. “How long will you stay with your parents this summer?” 27 days.
And when we got married, “How many kids do you want to have?” 27.
His favorite number was 27 partly for comedic effect, partly to give him time to think of the real answer, which was 7 kids.
We wanted to have time in our marriage to enjoy each other and get to know each other really well before adding kids to the family. We followed another dream first and found that we loved where we landed. In Honduras, we both had challenging, satisfying jobs and a delightful community of colleagues and friends to go with them. We had to leave for a couple years in order for me to teach in low-income schools to fulfill the requirements of a grant I had received for my degree. We would tell people we wanted to go back to Honduras, their question was, “How long do you want to be in Honduras this time?” 27 years. We meant it.
We had started to mean that number in other areas, too. At least, it had rubbed off on me a little. I had always jumped in to correct the flippant “27” to say 3 kids was a good family size. I liked being the oldest of three. Soon I was saying four. Then we were both saying seven. And meaning it.
We did not get pregnant.
It was agonizing to have this dream unfulfilled. Undiagnosed infertility is just a clinical term. It misses all the depth of so many emotions that go with the problem, the struggle to cling to your spouse, the impossibility to make sense of it, the injustice of not getting a label with a succinct reason.
We dutifully began working through the options: procedures to diagnose a problem that never became clear, medications offered to encourage things along, IVF prices laid out as if the questions that came with them were not huge and terribly important.
One of the questions was determining if we needed to try so hard to bring our own genetic child into the world. There are kids waiting in the foster system. Women bravely choosing to place their babies for adoption. Children in orphanages throughout the world waiting for a loving family. In light of these very real circumstances, we decided not to pursue IVF. We did decide to answer someone else’s question: “What will become of our still-frozen embryos now that our family is complete?”
Thus began our journey with the Nightlight Snowflakes program. Our wonderful, perfect Liliana was born from our embryo adoption. She is a thinker and a watcher, adventurous and strong-willed, fully embracing the toddler stage. We are so grateful for the embryos placed with us because we have Liliana – and a good relationship with her placing family. Our baby #2 is due in 2023. Four more potential genetic siblings are waiting. This has been an answer to prayer, both for our family and our placing family. We enjoy telling Liliana’s story and hope that she will enjoy telling others about embryo adoption, too!
Fifteen years ago, life looked a whole lot different.
My husband and I had been married for five years. We were in the thick of infertility struggles with no answers and no end in sight. We decided a Hawaii trip for Thanksgiving was in order to get away from life for a while and give ourselves a bit of a reset. We did a lot of dreaming and praying on that trip, hoping that God would answer our long awaited prayers for a family.
On our trip, we stumbled upon Makena Beach and when we left the beach that day I remember telling him that I really liked that name and if God were to ever bless us with a little girl I thought we should name her Makena. When we discovered the meaning of the name, “gift of happiness”, we were sold. I continued to dream that dream. Recently, I even found a prayer journal with Makena Best scribbled in the margin. I can remember vividly where I was sitting when I wrote it too; at the same hotel I’m sitting in right now, listening to the same ocean waves crashing in the distance.
Fast forward fifteen years and my heart is just exploding tonight. This is one of those full circle moments in life. The moments where you can clearly see God’s hand at work and I couldn’t be more full of thanksgiving. As we prepared to depart on our flight to Hawaii, my eyes filled with tears staring at Makenna and remembering that day at Makena Beach. Today, as we walked onto Makena Beach, hand in hand, it was so awesome to be able to share this full circle moment with my girl.
What is so crazy to me is that God knew this outcome the entire time. He knew as I jotted in my prayer journal 15 years ago that these sweet kiddos had already been created and He was saving them just for us. He knew that His plans for our family were so much better than anything we could hope or dream. He knew He would knock our socks off with not only a Makenna, but an Alex too!
The best part was the smile on MaKenna’s face the entire day. She loves hearing the story about us at Makena Beach. She was in heaven today soaking in all of the love. We laid around, we jumped in the waves, we walked on the beach and we saw the most amazing sunset. But, best of all, we remembered what a good God we serve and that even in the midst of trials and pain He is so faithful.
Tonight we are all smiling a little bigger. We are thankful we could take this trip together as a family to celebrate all the ways God has blessed us.
My daughters keep their baby dolls in the freezer to keep them safe, just like they were. And I wouldn’t have it any other way.
I remember the pain of infertility so vividly. There was a time when I thought I wouldn’t be able to continue my career as a sonographer. Scanning pregnant women everyday felt unfair. I ached to relate to my patients. I wondered if I would ever know what the first trimester was like, how it felt to experience a baby move inside of you, the magic of birth, the chaos of motherhood.
My husband and I were young. Doctors were hopeful. But after three years of trying everything from pills to injections, an IUI, dozens of supplements, acupuncture, and two rounds of IVF resulting in one poor quality embryo, we felt like we had exhausted all of our options.
Our Reproductive Endocrinologist met with us over the phone since we were on vacation. He told us he was just as shocked as we were -- that on top of PCOS, a polyp removal and endometriosis, I likely had poor egg quality. We could continue to throw money at IVF in hopes we could find one good egg, or we could explore adoption or embryo adoption.
We spent the remainder of our vacation processing and researching our options. A couple weeks later, I found myself calling Nightlight. I remember our phone call bringing me hope. We already had some diversity in the family through domestic adoption of our two nieces. My husband thought pregnancy would be a great way for him to bond and we both thought it would be good for me to experience carrying a pregnancy, especially given my job. I was guarded as it would mean more chances of experiencing more negative pregnancy tests. But we were thrilled when we chose Nightlight, and I started to hope again. Eager to begin, we sped through the requirements in two months. We were matched quickly and found out I was pregnant with one embryo after our first transfer of two.
When I met our first daughter, it was a redemptive experience for me. Now I’m chasing around her biological sister, too. While the heartache of infertility will always be part of me, I'm grateful for the path it led my husband and me to. I got to experience all those things I hoped for, and now I'm knee-deep in the chaos of motherhood filled with gratitude for Nightlight and our embryo adoption journey.
Tori and Sam completed their first frozen embryo transfer in October 2022. Tori shared her thoughts as they prepared for their transfer day.
"I was going back and forth on sharing this, but I know to believe in the power of prayer and the importance of this day. Today we transferred two of our 13 embryos. After 20 years of being frozen, they are given the SHOT (pun intended) at life.
I sit here feeling so honored that the Lord saw fit for us to do embryo adoption. A year ago I took time off of work to pray about the burden I had about having children. I knew I was supposed to carry children. I had the strongest desire to do so, but in that moment I begged God to take that feeling away.
He didn’t, and today I know why.
We have been waiting six years for these babies, and they have been waiting 20 years for us.
Thank you to everyone who has gone through this journey with us. We ask for your prayers for embryo A and embryo B in that the Lord’s will be done. If we only get a week with them or decades, we love them all the same. Our prayer is for a baby (or babies!), but as we know God’s plan is perfect despite the outcome.
In the reminding words of my sister, “This is the day that the Lord has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it.”
Psalm 118:24
So we will thank Him today, tomorrow, and each day we are gifted in the life of these precious gifts from God. Plus a huge thank you to our donors who chose us to be the parent of their precious babies."
Tori and Sam are now pregnant with one child from this embryo transfer of two, Day 3, 20- year, slow frozen embryos. Please continue to pray for their pregnancy!
Drew was diagnosed with a rare genetic mutation causing the early onset of colon cancer prior to us dating or getting married. This rare mutation posed a great risk of being passed along to any biological children we would have, so we made the extremely hard decision to not have biological children of our own.
While we are grateful Drew is cancer free, he struggled with ongoing medical complications for many years. The doctor appointments, tests, exams, and surgeries postponed us staring a family well beyond what we originally desired. We saw God provide for us during many difficult times, and were expectant this would continue with the journey of growing our family. Adoption was on both of our hearts for many years, and we felt led to grow our family in this way.
We chose embryo adoption for many reasons, but this choice allowed Jaimi to experience pregnancy and childbirth, a dream she had since she was a little girl. We contacted Snowflakes in 2020 and began the journey of embryo adoption. We entered into this journey fearful of the financial aspect because we had not been able to save as much money as we had hoped due to medical bills. We were expectant for God to provide, and that He did. We were so grateful for all of the helpful staff at Snowflakes who guided us through this journey, helping educate us, fundraise, and match with a placing family. Everyone we interacted with was supportive, encouraging, and genuine in all they said and did.
We were matched with a family and adopted seven embryos. In November 2021, Jaimi had her first transfer of two embryos, resulting in a twin pregnancy. During the pregnancy, we built an amazing relationship with the placing family through letters, texts, phone calls, and video calls. The placing family traveled to meet us and attended family baby showers to celebrate the pregnancy. On July 18, 2022, Jaimi gave birth to Zoe and Tobias Kitchen. We are so thankful for two healthy babies and are extremely grateful to Snowflakes for giving us the opportunity to grow our family in this way. We have continued to grow closer with the placing family and they recently came for a visit to meet the twins in person. The siblings have a good understanding of who we are and who their siblings are, and the interactions between them are precious. We are thankful for an open adoption that will allow Zoe and Tobias to know where they come from and how loved they are. We look forward to this ongoing relationship and the many more memories we will share together.
By Christmas of 2019, we knew that God was leading us to adopt. Which agency should we use? Which type of adoption should we pursue? How long would it take? How much would it cost? We were filled with questions but also optimism.
By spring of 2020, we were well on our way through the application process for the Nightlight Snowflakes program. Now we had new questions: Will this work? If it does, will we get a boy? A girl? Twins? How attractive will our profile be to placing families? Like every major thing in life, everything is about God’s purposes and timing and learning to trust Him. As we’ve learned, almost everything in life worth doing or experiencing tends to take longer than you expected.
By the end of 2020, we had a match! By May of 2021, we had a positive pregnancy test. And on January 12, 2022, we had our son: Amos Jackson “A.J.”. As we approach his first birthday, we’re finding that every cliché about parenting—especially concerning the early years—is so true.
Are the early weeks and months exhausting? Yes!
Does time fly by, almost frighteningly quick? Yes!
Would you be willing to do anything to meet the needs of your child? Yes!
Is being a parent as fulfilling as everyone says? Yes!
As a couple, we’ve often found that almost all our conversations revolve around what’s going on with him. How did he sleep last night? How did he nap today? What new thing did he do? Wasn’t that the cutest!?
Despite all our focus on him, our life as a couple isn’t any less important. In fact, it’s probably more important. We’ve tried to create intentional opportunities for time together in the evening after Amos is asleep. We’ve also tried to still go on dates. We’re trying to continue to cultivate our own growth as individuals and as a couple, realizing that a healthy mom and dad will make for a happier child.
We’ve done several things to try to slow things down and ensure that we’re enjoying this precious boy while he is small. First, we’ve made as many trips as we can to visit family. Both of our families live in other states, so we’ve had to be intentional to share time with them during this tender season. Second, we’ve taken loads of pictures and videos. Naturally everyone does that, but at every step of his development he is doing new things and changing his looks. We’re trying to document it as well as we can. Third, we share the responsibilities. While mom stays at home, we’re both trying to share the entire experience of parenthood together. Weekends become especially important to just be together. Finally, we still try to spend a lot of time with friends. They love seeing us enjoy the son we had prayed for over many years. And in many cases these are the same friends who prayed for us and supported the adoption financially.
Ultimately, the most important lesson we’ve learned is to trust God every step of the way, and try to slow down and enjoy each moment. Embryo adoption is a beautiful way to connect with your adoptive child in utero. My wife comments about this even today when we look at our son. But it’s also a blessing to be able to partner with a placing family to give their embryos every opportunity to become what God intends.
Unexplained infertility kept us from our dream for years. We had reached a point in our journey that we knew adoption was going to be how we built our family.
In 2019, we had plans to go on a group trip to Israel. The truth was I (Kate) didn’t want to go on our trip, I wanted to use those funds to go towards adoption. I had been praying for an open door for adoption or for God to open my womb. His answer came when we were on that very trip.
A couple of days into the tour, one of the ladies in our group told me about a family she was helping who had 5 frozen embryos They were trying to find a Christian home for them. I told Drew about them and after we returned home, we thought and prayed about it. A month after our return, we decided we wanted to adopt them but had no idea where to begin the process. After running into a few dead ends, I remembered a Snowflake’s Facebook ad a friend had sent me years ago. I called them to see if they would be able to help us with a pre-matched adoption. Once our placing family agreed, we began the process as Snowflake’s first pre-matched case.
Initially, we didn’t think we needed anything more than someone who knew the ins and outs of embryo adoption, but we gained so much more by going through Snowflakes. Their adoption model of having a “home study” complete with education, was invaluable to us. We learned the importance of telling our children their story and having those communication lines always open about their adoption with us. We were far better prepared to be adoptive parents having had gone through Snowflakes.
In late 2020, our precious boy/girl twins were born. God had said yes to my prayers for an open door and an open womb.
Our journey to embryo adoption started years before it became a reality in our lives. Five years into marriage, we were able to get pregnant but soon lost this baby to a miscarriage. We assumed another pregnancy would quickly follow, but months turned into years of waiting and wishing. After going to a fertility specialist, we realized that pregnancy on our own was nearly impossible. We
took time to grieve the loss of what we thought our journey would look like.
Not long after this news, we were introduced to embryo adoption. It quickly became real that this was an option for us. After deciding to pursue this route, the process moved fairly quickly. We were matched with an amazing family and never looked back. Within a few months, we found out we were pregnant! Fast forward many years, and our Snowflake baby is now eight years old. Our
beautiful blonde hair, blue eyed girl is one of God’s biggest gifts in our life.
Our other is our son who was welcomed through traditional adoption five years ago. When we started the embryo adoption process, we knew that we wanted to stay in touch with the genetic family; we just had no idea how this would play out. What started as communicating through the agency, turned into emailing and following each other on social media. We have always been very open with our daughter about her story, and she had mentioned meeting several times. We knew it was not an “if”, but “when.” Just this past summer, we had a feeling it was time!
Our daughter’s genetic family was so excited to hear the news. We wasted no time, and our little foursome boarded a plane to California to meet this family we had only known on “paper.” (But somehow felt like we already knew). It was everything we hoped and more! Our daughter and her genetic siblings bonded quickly and became instant friends. It was pure delight watching them laugh and play together. My husband and I also stepped into an immediate friendship with the genetic parents. It was very surreal to all be together, and we stood in awe of how God brought our two families together so many years ago.
What started as a journey of heartache and sadness for two couples was replaced with complete joy and thankfulness. After spending two days together, we said our goodbyes, but I think we were all confident this was just the beginning of our next chapter together.
Looking back almost twenty years ago when we were married, we had no idea the crazy, bumpy, up and down journey God would take us on to one day have a family. Now that we see the plan more clearly, we would walk it all over again. We are so blessed to have our amazing children and so thankful to our daughter’s genetic family for saying “yes” to the call to adoption. I’m sure that
they never thought this would be their path either, but I’m so grateful it led us both to this point. We are very excited to see what God does next in our daughter’s story; in faith we know and believe it will continue to be beyond anything we could have imagined.
There are SO many stories that could be told, but I will share probably the most important one to our journey!
We are one of the first families to use the Snowflakes Embryo Adoption Program. Our first embryo adoption resulted in 6 sweet souls heading to heaven ahead of us. My husband and I waited a few months and ultimately chose to match with another family and adopt another set of embryos. We were matched with a couple from Canada who chose us to adopt their 5 embryos. After the obligatory paperwork formalities, a shipment date was arranged for our teeny frozen ones to travel from Canada to the US. Naturally my husband and I were tracking their trip which began just days before the Thanksgiving holiday weekend.
I was more than a little alarmed when I was contacted by Nightlight telling us that our cryo-tank containing our embryos had been detained at Customs. It was being held until the package could be thoroughly inspected! After many phone calls to Nightlight and Federal Express, we found a guardian angel in a Fed Ex agent who was touched and amazed when we shared our Nightlight story and told her the contents of that oh-so-valuable package! This lovely FedEx employee made it her mission to protect our frozen embryos and move them through inspection without the tank being opened. Those 5 little siblings arrived at our clinic the day before Thanksgiving 2001. Thankful? YES! What a gift! One of those five embryos became our beautiful daughter, Zara Elizabeth, Snowflake #18.
(Editor's Note: Because of this experience with customs, and other complications, Snowflakes ceased importing embryos internationally.)
We were hoping to have kids, but we found quickly that we had low fertility.
After beginning the diagnosis process, we had one son and one miscarriage. Rather than continue down the path of diagnosis, we felt it a better investment of our resources to pursue adoption. We began our domestic infant adoption journey.
We chose Nightlight Christian Adoptions in their Waco, TX office because they were local, and, at the time, had lower fees than many other agencies and didn’t vary fees based on ‘desirability’ of the child. We completed our home study and were approved for domestic infant adoption.
We waited. And waited. And waited.
The wait was hard, but in the meantime, God was also working in our hearts. We had considered embryo adoption, but I (Pete) had not been feeling ready to face losing children who did not survive the thawing process. Over that year of waiting, I became convicted that taking serious emotional risks is sometimes an important part of answering the call to love one's neighbor as one's self. It was time to renew our home study, and Rachael and I decided it was time to switch from Domestic Infant adoption to the Snowflakes program.
After several months, we were matched with a family who had five embryos, but was not going to be able to parent those five children. They had reviewed our family profile and decided that we were a possible match. After a weekend of intense prayer, we replied to Nightlight that we wanted to accept the match and adopt those five children.
We finished the contracts in October of 2015 and in December traveled to New York City for our first embryo transfer of two of the five embryos. One of the two did not survive. With joy we welcomed our son Owen, our second born, was born in Aug 2016. I (Rachael) traveled to New York for the second transfer with the remaining three embryos in May 2018. Sadly, none of these babies survived to birth. The relationship with Owen's genetic parent was mediated at first, now we have opened up to more contact. I got to meet her when I traveled to New York for the second transfer, and we’ve had some fun conversations since then about house building, stoves, children, parenting and solar eclipses!
I've been asked "what was it like being pregnant with your adopted child?" and, honestly, it was a whole lot like being pregnant with my biological son. I had a nurse at one newborn check-up get very confused as I was nursing Owen and telling her that my family medical history wasn't pertinent for Owen because he is adopted.
We had one friend comment, "wow, this is very 21st century stuff". It really is fun to get to explain that Owen is adopted, but I did give birth to him. It’s such a privilege to be Mommy and Daddy to both of these boys, despite the different ways they joined our family. It’s not DNA that makes a family, it a choice to love and unconditionally accept these children as our own.
Reflecting back to when our journey began, it is unbelievable how blessed we are to be a family. After our first year of marriage and buying our first home, the next step would typically be having a baby. For some, growing your family comes easy but for others like us; it took lots of work, lots of faith and many emotions.
We are in this together, I always tell my husband, and nobody fights a battle alone. Our family and friends have been extremely supportive during our journey of infertility. Positivity and strong faith have helped us through our journey. The power of prayer is pretty amazing. After settling into our new home in October 2017, our focus could now be on growing our family. We had received our doctor’s information from my cousin awhile back and just tucked it away if we ever needed it in the future. In February 2018, we needed that number.
We scheduled a consultation the beginning of February. At our appointment, the new doctor provided us with information on Nightlight/Snowflakes Embryo Adoption. Later that month, we attended an Infertility Conference in our hometown and had the opportunity to speak to a Nightlight team member. This process restored hope that one day we would have children to call our own and start growing our family. From that moment, we knew God had guided us to this opportunity to bring our children into the world and experience the joys of pregnancy, parenthood and all the other wonderful moments. The joy of a child coming into the world is the biggest blessing and miracle anyone could ever experience.
Fast forward to November 2018, we got the phone call we had prayed for WE MATCHED! In March 2019, we scheduled our first transfer and it was a success! We prayed every morning and each night before bed for a safe and healthy pregnancy and a healthy baby. Many emotions hit especially since my father had just entered hospice. My dad held on until December 2019, just two weeks before our sweet girl was born. Even though they never met on earth, they share the most special bond. Her cardinal bird visits to know he his always near.
Our sweet Anna was born December 2019 and she is the biggest blessing in the world! Anna will be three in December and we cannot imagine life without our sweet Snowflakes baby. Every night we say our prayers and thank God for the greatest gift.
We were both in our 30s when we married and wanted to enjoy some time just the two of us. We agreed to wait at least a year until we tried to start a family.
After about 6 months, we changed course and decided to begin our journey to parenthood. After a year passed, I made an appointment to see an infertility specialist. I was sure that I was the problem. I was almost 35 after all and considered “geriatric” in clinical terms. We both completed the required testing, discovered we had a male infertility factor. My husband was diagnosed with azoospermia, meaning his body makes almost zero sperm.
We were heartbroken but determined! As soon as we found out, we didn’t let that deter us from starting our family. We began looking into foster care and independent adoption.
Within a couple of weeks, we’d heard about a single young woman who had two little girls and was now pregnant with twins. We met with her to discuss the possibility of adoption. Three days before the twins were born, she told us she had decided to parent. We were devastated. We that God had a plan for our family, so we kept our heads up and kept trying.
We became a foster care licensed family, but the waiting time for young children was 1-2 years. Our impatience grew as we waited and waited to receive a call. We realized, while we love what the foster care system offers for children, we needed to find something that would move things a long a little faster.
In February of 2021, my mom sent me a link to the Snowflakes Embryo Adoption Program. Mitch and I had discussed sperm donation but did not feel like it was the right choice for us. Embryo adoption, however, was something totally new and different. We decided to explore the option and as we did, we had a strong feeling that this was how we were supposed to grow our family.
Our placing family had used both an egg donor and sperm donor to create their IVF embryos. At first, Mitch and I were hesitant as this was a little different than we had imagined. We talked about it and agreed that God is the creator of life and the genetics did not matter. After that realization, we excitedly accepted the match and our 7 embryos arrived in July of 2021! We did our first frozen embryo transfer in November of 2021 and welcomed our daughter, Abigail, in July of 2022.
The Snowflake Embryo Adoption program gave us hope in the midst of discouragement and disappointment. We cannot deny God’s hand in our journey. We have more faith than ever that He has a plan for our little family, and that Abigail is right where she is supposed to be.
David and I had always dreamed of having children and a year into our marriage we started to try on our own. As months passed and nothing was happening, I started to consult our doctors. Doctor after doctor said the same thing; “just keep trying this should be easy!” As we approached the one-year mark on trying naturally, I finally got the referral to see a fertility specialist. After our initial testing and first meeting with our doctor, we learned that David had poor morphology and I had a diminished ovarian reserve. But the doctor told us the same thing we had been hearing “you’re only 28 and David is 38, this should be easy!”
Well it continued to not be easy. After 3 failed IUIs we moved on to IVF. We went through 4 egg retrievals, which only totaled in 4 embryos. When it was time to start with frozen embryo transfers, we were told the same thing “this should be easy!” After each failed transfer, I sought out more and more specialists. It felt like we saw every doctor that ended in “-ist!” But after each allergist, hematologist, etc. appointment nothing was changing. I was put on every medication in the fertility field and had every type of procedure done. We even switched fertility clinics yet nothing was changing. After we failed with our last embryo we finally heard “this is not going to be easy, but we think we have a potential answer.” After many conversations with our doctor and much soul searching we came to the conclusion that embryo adoption was the ideal fit for our family.
Our doctor highly recommended Snowflakes and we soon began the embryo adoption process. We flew through each phase with the help of the wonderful people at Snowflakes. With each step completed, we grew more and more excited knowing that we would soon be matched with a placing family. I will never forget receiving that email right after the holidays; “we have a match!”
As soon as we read our placing family’s profile, we knew we were a perfect fit! The next steps flew by as well and by the end of that summer I was FINALLY pregnant. I gave birth to our daughter, our little Snowflakes baby, in May. We have a wonderful relationship with our placing family and we truly feel that we were meant to be.
It may not have felt like it at times, but we wouldn’t change a single thing about our journey to our daughter. We feel truly blessed.
JOY, sadness, loss and HOPE. I’m sure many have a similar story, my husband and I had a rollercoaster journey to get to where we are today.
My husband and I met late in life and we married in 2008. We had our first daughter in January 2011. It was an easy pregnancy, labor and delivery and a beautiful baby, Scotia Rose. We decided to wait 2 years before attempting a second pregnancy. Sadly, that second pregnancy ended in 2015.
We began looking for other options for growing our family.
We are grateful to God and give Him all of the glory as we walked our journey. So many people helped us along the way: Our placing family, the Snowflakes team, our medical team, our family, friends and church. Prayer was an essential element for us.
We first learned about the Snowflakes program and embryo adoption in June 2017. When I started my research, I knew, that I knew, that I knew, this was the adoption choice for us. I had goosebumps all over my body and my heart was jumping out of my chest, beating a million beats per second. Without a doubt, we both agreed this was our path.
We were matched with a placing family who had 2 remaining embryos. In January 2019, we had our first FET. We were pregnant! I carried our sweet Angelica Irene for 5 months, but she passed away due to a horrible umbilical cord accident.
We felt defeated; the wind was completely taken out of our sails. We were confused and questioning what we should do next. We had one remaining adopted embryo. We took time to grieve and pray. We were committed to all the embryos we adopted.
Our second FET was successful, too. In July 2020, our hope was restored and our daughter Raylei Hope was born. Our family is now complete. We can’t imagine our lives, our family, without our two daughters. Our girls were conceived in the same year, but Raylei was frozen 9 years before she was born!
If anyone reading our story is considering embryo adoption we want to cheer you on! You may experience sadness, loss, doubts, fear, joy and hope in your amazing journey. It is worth it!
The road to parenthood has had many twists and turns for me and my husband. I look back on all the miracles we’ve witnessed along the way and am amazed at the beautiful story God has woven together.
Kurk and I were married in 2013. He had two children of his own but had ended his ability to have more after his second child was born. I went into marriage knowing that we would need help to grow our family and fulfill my heart’s desire to be a mother. In 2016, we had an unsuccessful vasectomy reversal surgery that left us devastated. As the years passed, we wondered if we would ever have any future children. Traditional adoption had always been on our hearts. We also pursued IVF for a time. But when we learned about the miracle of embryo adoption, our hearts lit up again with hope. It was the beautiful merging of both desires of our hearts: adoption and giving birth to our own children. Snowflakes Adoption Agency was the first agency we reached out to and instantly knew they were the right fit. So, as a global pandemic was rocking the world in early 2020, we began our adoption journey!
Snowflakes’ staff was incredibly caring and compassionate as they helped us navigate the phases of the adoption process. 8 months in, we reached the matching phase – the part I was most anxious about. Who would this family be? What would they look like? Would it feel right? All these questions swirled around in my head, but I trusted knowing how much prayer went into the matches that Snowflakes makes. Little did we know how incredible of a match God had waiting for us!
In November 2020, the words “We have a Match” popped up in my inbox." With butterflies in our stomachs, we read that a family had chosen us for their 8 remaining embryos! I was so nervous to look at their profile that I asked my husband to read it first. I’ll never forget the look on his face after he read their letter. “I know them!” he said. I was in disbelief as Kurk explained that he knew this wonderful couple from years ago. As an added curveball, they lived one town over from us! Worlds were colliding. Out of all the families across the US, this was the family we were matched with. We knew in our hearts this was God-orchestrated, one that we could have never made ourselves but only by His divine plan. The placing mom said it best, “it must be God!”
We officially became adoptive parents to our 8 little embryos in December 2020. Soon after, we got to meet our placing family in person! They welcomed us into their lovely home with open arms, as if we’d been a part of their family for years. We hugged, we cried, and we all shared in the awe of what God was doing in all our lives. I got to hold their little boy who was turning one at the time. His little face gave me a glimpse of what my future children might look like. My heart was overwhelmed with joy and gratitude.
Then came the time to schedule our first transfer! It felt surreal to finally get the chance to become pregnant after all these years of waiting. We were hopeful, nervous and everything in-between. In February 2021, our first try was successful, and our embryo attached! But this little one was only with us for 8 short weeks before Jesus chose to take him home. We gave him the name Kaleb, meaning “wholehearted devotion to God”. Our placing family surrounded us with prayers and support. They even made a plaque for him in our flower garden where he is buried. We took the time to grieve and celebrate his beautiful life.
In October 2021 we were ready to try for a second transfer. This try was also successful and in June of this year we welcomed our darling daughter, Kaydance Liberty. She is the answer to so many prayers! Our placing family came to meet her at the hospital when she arrived. It was an incredible moment seeing them hold her for the first time. Through all the years of heartache, disappointments, failed surgeries/transfers, and losses for both families, we all now get to hold the promised children God gave us. He is faithful. Our story was always meant to be bigger than just us.
Our Snowflakes baby, Phoebe, has been a joy since Day 1.
Now, at 4 1/2 years old, she shows us daily why this precious form of adoption is so essential. Over the past several years, we've developed a strong relationship with our daughter's placing family. Remarkably, God created a path that placed us within a 90-minute drive of each other. We've attended a musical starring our daughter's genetic siblings, shared meals at our respective homes and shared photos and updates.
Phoebe now mentions her placing family on a regular basis and looks forward to any opportunity to spend time together. What's more, her placing family gifted her with boxes and boxes of Barbie toys, houses and vehicles their daughters cherished for years. In this way, our daughter maintains a close connection with her placing family that we believe will be a rich blessing to all of us for life.
Phoebe loves to spend time outdoors, collect eggs from our chickens, get scared by her three big brothers and cuddle with Mommy after a busy day of homeschool and play. Our little copper-haired cutie charms everyone she meets and reveals the gift of embryo adoption to those who've never heard of it. But don't let her hear me say that. Phoebe will make sure to tell you she's a Big Girl - and she's going places, whether you decide to join in or not!
A Poem Of Adoption Thankfulness
A little red-headed girl races into the room,
Fleeing the scene of the dance class.
Her arms thrown wide, the dancer’s pose, she frames her pink ballet tutu,
Shouts freely and loudly for all to hear,
“I have to tell you something, Daddy!”
A close embrace, pulled gently along, a father’s ear, a daughter’s secret words,
“I love you, Daddy.”
I release her from the hug and repeat the words back to her,
Hands on arms for just a moment.
Then she turns and lo, the nimble flight back to dance class,
In a whir of tulle and tights.
So it goes with adoption.
We invite the light,
Embrace the light,
And then it flies away,
To set the world ablaze in love.
Our adoption story began in 2017. My husband was away, hunting. I felt the Lord asking us to pursue foster care and adoption. I was not on board with that plan. When Nic returned from hunting, he said, “Hey, I think we should do foster care or something”. I laughed, knowing that indeed was the leading of the Lord.
At the time we were living in an old farm house with only 4 bedrooms (all of which were already filled with our 4 kids) and 1 bathroom. Knowing we would need more space we decided to rebuild the house. We moved into a fifth wheel trailer in one of our pastures where we lived for one crazy year. We were able to move into our new house in June of 2019. We felt ready to start our home study and licensing process for foster care.
In January of 2020 we got our first placement! We fell in love with this beautiful angel and were heading full steam ahead into the adoption process. However, we soon found out that a family member had been located. It was devastating but also wonderful. A chance to be with her biological family was the best thing for her.
It was difficult for our family to let go of our foster daughter. Was foster care the right path for us? I spoke with our caseworker and she mentioned the Snowflakes Embryo Adoption Program. Like many others, I had no idea what that was! My husband and I began to do research regarding embryo adoption and learned more directly from the agency. We decided to pursue embryo adoption.
In September 2020, we were matched with an awesome family who had six remaining embryos. But life became a perfect storm. The same week our foster daughter left our home, Nic was diagnosed with leukemia. We were also in the midst of finalizing our embryo adoption contracts with our placing family. We knew it was only right for us to tell the placing family about the leukemia – but we were sad to think the match might be broken.
Their response was amazing! They said they knew those babies were our babies and that God was going to heal Nic. We finalized the documents at the same time we were in Houston seeking treatment for Nic. In seven days, he was completely clear of cancer. He has been in clinical remission since June of 2021!
In November 2021 we had our first frozen embryo transfer with two of the six embryos. At our follow up ultrasound, we saw one very happy, healthy baby. In July 2022 we welcomed our Snowflakes baby boy!
It was a long, hard, and at times scary journey; but when I look at my beautiful son, I know that it was all worth it. The Lord made a way for our entire family to come out on the other side whole. We still have our beautiful home, our foster Goddaughter, a cancer free Nic, our kids know how to fight through hard things and trust God, our beautiful baby boy, and a dream for our other snowflake babies in the future. Only God can do this!
My husband Steven and I had always talked about adoption, even before we knew that we would have fertility challenges. After failing IUI and IVF, the reality of adoption really sunk in, and God moved our hearts in that direction. Thanks to an orphan care ministry at our church, we were introduced to the Snowflakes program and decided to pursue embryo adoption.
We were matched with a family in California who had used an egg donor to conceive their 12 embryos, and had boy/girl twins (born in 1998). The remaining 7 embryos had been frozen for 18 years at the point that we adopted them into our family. From those embryos, our family was blessed with Tyler (born in 2017) and Jayden (born in 2021- from a 23 year old embryo!). We also had a surprise natural conception in between embryo transfers (Hannah, born in 2019). You would never guess that two of our children are adopted- I carried all three pregnancies, and they certainly all act like siblings!
When we pursued the Snowflakes program, we knew we wanted an open adoption, and now our relationship with our placing family has truly been a blessing from God. From the beginning of our journey, Brianna (Tyler and Jayden’s full genetic sister, who is in her 20’s) has been passionate about establishing a relationship with her brothers. Her brother and parents have also welcomed us as family. Brianna came to visit and meet us in person just a few weeks after the birth of Tyler, and again after Hannah’s birth, and then finally to meet Jayden. She has been an extended part of our family, and we are so grateful for that! It is so sweet to see her interact with her younger brothers and sister, and they all adore her. It is also a blessing to have biological family and the health history that this offers for our boys.
This past July, Brianna got married! She invited us all to her wedding, and even went beyond the invite to ask our children to be in her wedding. Tyler and Jayden were ring bearers, and Hannah was her flower girl. The fact that she included all of us was such an honor, and we were so grateful to be a part of her special day. Hannah was invited to get ready with the ladies before the wedding, and she felt like such a princess. Tyler pulled the wagon with Hannah and Jayden down the aisle, and he took his role very seriously. We also enjoyed getting to know the extended placing family, who all invited us in like we had always been a part of the family. God is truly painting a beautiful picture with this unique relationship we all share. We look forward to our families’ relationship to continue growing in the years to come!
Dustin and I decided after our 2nd wedding anniversary (Nov. 2015) to begin trying to start adding children to our family. To our surprise, it didn’t happen right away.
In December 2016 we finally had a positive pregnancy test! Everything progressed as normal until our 20-week appointment. It was confirmed, our baby was suffering from a type of skeletal dysplasia and would not survive. That was in March 2017.
After this terrible experience we did genetic testing and discovered I am a carrier of Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy. If we were to get pregnant again, our boys would have a 50% chance of being affected by the disease and girls would have a 50% chance of being carriers. We decided these were not odds we were willing to accept. Our doctor suggested using an egg donor.
We attempted a pregnancy using donor eggs, which only resulted in one viable embryo. We did achieve a pregnancy, but miscarried at 11 weeks. It was heartbreaking.
We learned about embryo adoption and decided to use a private agency and matched with a family with a single embryo. It was an unsuccessful transfer.
We decided pregnancy was not going to be an option for us so be began pursuing a private domestic adoption through an attorney. Simultaneously we established ourselves as licensed foster care parents. We were matched with birth parents through the attorney, but after the baby was born, they decided to parent themselves. Failure again!
Our first foster placement was a little girl names Brenley. We cared for her for 2 years and we were finally able to adopt her! Foster care and adoption allowed up to take a break from the world of infertility and pregnancy loss.
When we decided we were ready to try pregnancy again we contacted the Snowflakes Embryo Adoption Program. It sounded like a very good option for us. They made the process so easy compared to all of the other experiences we had. Snowflakes was the best! Our journey went quickly and we were matched with an amazing placing family who gifted us with 6 embryos. We were ecstatic!
In February 2021 we transferred one of our frozen embryos and on my birthday in March we learned we were pregnant! We communicated with the placing parents to let them know the good news and kept them informed throughout our pregnancy. In October 2021 we rejoiced at the birth of our son Arlo – an experience we never thought we would have.
We can’t begin to explain how grateful we are for our donor placing family and for the Snowflakes team. What a wild journey we have had trying to build our family. We will be forever thankful for the Snowflakes program and how they helped us experience pregnancy and childbirth. We would recommend the Snowflakes program to anyone and love sharing information about the process and opportunities that they offer.
Arlo is a year old now. The past year has been an amazing time for our family. He brings all of us so much joy and has helped my husband and I heal in a way we never thought could be healed. He is the happiest little guy and so loveable – he brings us joy!
We had always dreamed of having children. A year into our marriage, we started to try on our own. As months passed and nothing was happening, I started to consult our doctors. They all said the same thing: “Just keep trying, this should be easy!”
As we approached the one-year mark, I finally got the referral to see a fertility specialist. After some initial testing, we learned that David had poor morphology and I had a diminished ovarian reserve. Our doctor told us (yet again), “You’re only 28 and 38, this should be easy!”
It was still not easy. After three failed IUIs, we moved on to IVF. We went through four egg retrieval cycles and had a total of four embryos created. After each failed transfer, I sought out more and more specialists. It felt like we saw every specialist there is! Despite every appointment with an allergist, hematologist, etc., nothing was changing. I was prescribed every fertility medication and had every procedure done.
After we failed with our last embryo, we were finally told, “This is not going to be easy, but we think we have a potential answer.” After many conversations with our doctor and much soul searching, we concluded that embryo adoption was the ideal fit for our family.
Our doctor highly recommended the Snowflakes Embryo Adoption Program, and we soon began the process. We flew through each phase with the help of the wonderful staff and with each step completed, we grew more and more excited knowing that we would soon be matched with a placing family. I will never forget receiving that email right after the holidays: Congratulations! You have been matched!
As soon as we read our donating family’s profile, we knew we were a perfect fit! The next steps flew by and by the end of that summer, I was FINALLY pregnant. I gave birth to our daughter, our little Snowflakes baby, in May. We have a wonderful open relationship with our placing family. The matching process was truly a success for both families.
It may not have felt like it at times, but we wouldn’t change a single thing about our adoption journey for our daughter. We feel truly blessed.
When we married in 2012, we expected our family life to unfold in the traditional way. We had no idea that conceiving a child would be a problem... By our fourth or fifth year of marriage, we realized that something was wrong. We went through numerous medical avenues to try to identify and correct the issue, but there seemed to be a roadblock at each step. The problem was unclear at times, and even when we had a sense of what the issue could be, interventions failed.
After three rounds of IUI, we knew that the Lord had something different in store for us. IVF was not an option for us for several reasons, so we began the adoption conversation in earnest.
We had always had a positive view of adoption, though it was hard to know where to begin. No one in our immediate families had much experience with adoption, so it was an educational process. Our local pregnancy resource center gave us a list of adoption agencies in our area, and Nightlight Christian Adoptions was one of the first ones we noticed. Coincidently, it was barely 10 minutes down the road from us!
Our first meeting went especially well. We learned of the Snowflakes Embryo Adoption Program. The idea made us a little anxious about something as novel as adopting embryos, but also intrigued at the same time. After further conversations, we determined that this was the right path for us. It gave Mckensie a chance to carry our child, it rescued human life from frozen state, and it blessed our placing family by providing their embryo a full opportunity to become all that God intended for them to become.
The most powerful way God showed His hand in this process is by raising up dozens of generous friends, family members, church members, and even acquaintances in the community to provide more than enough financial support to go through the entire process! However, challenges lay ahead…
Our first transfer attempt initially looked promising, but then quickly failed. We were deeply disappointed that two embryos did not end up as twins in our arms. However, we simply trusted God to show Himself mighty and generous in our journey.
We had to wait several months before our second transfer, but we finally transferred our final two embryos in May 2021. We waited, prayed, and waited. By early June, we found out we had a little one on the way!
The pregnancy was difficult at stages, but worth every struggle, as we knew we had a little boy on the way. In January 2022, he arrived—not a moment too soon. Amos Jackson joined our family and has been more of a blessing than we could have ever imagined. Parenthood has been demanding and exhausting, but by far the highlight of our ten years of marriage.
We stand grateful to God, our family, church, friends, our placing family, and to Nightlight for making our desire become a reality!
My husband and I were praying about what it would look like to grow our family. While we were considering our own family, we were also encouraging two close friends who adopted children into their families. One family chose the path of domestic infant adoption, the other international adoption. We were challenged and amazed by the way adoption reflects God’s adoption of us into His family. We decided to start exploring the various adoption options available to us.
We did our research, attended classes, and talked to adoption agencies, trusting God would open and close the appropriate doors. This journey led us to the Snowflakes Embryo Adoption program through Nightlight Christian Adoptions. We felt so excited as we started learning more about the program, and we loved the idea of pregnancy and the pre-natal bonding with our baby. We decided to move forward with Snowflakes, all the while asking God to close the door if this was not the path He wanted us to follow. Through Snowflakes, we learned that there are over one million frozen embryos in storage in the United States. Believing life begins at conception, we knew these embryos deserved to be protected and given a chance at life.
As we worked through the application process through Snowflakes, we were especially thankful for the education they provided to families. We came away with a deeper understanding of adoption, resources we could use as adoptive parents, and many moments of intentional conversations and prayer over our family. We finished our paperwork in June, completed our home study, and moved into the matching phase of the program in July. We had created our family profile which is used to match us with a placing family with remaining embryos. We were successfully matched with a family three months later!
We had our first frozen embryo transfer in January 2019, and were ecstatic to find out we were pregnant! Our daughter, Lily Grace, was born in September 2019. Her genetic sibling, Cooper James, joined our family two years later. We are so thankful that Lily Grace and Cooper will get to grow up with each other. We cannot imagine life without them and are so thankful that God used embryo adoption in our life story.
We love all the small and special memories we have already made as a family. We have an open adoption with their genetic family, and it has been such a blessing to have their love and support! Emailing back and forth with them to share updates and pictures is fun and special. We cannot wait to share with our children about their amazing story and the loving sacrifice that their genetic parents made in that story to get them into our home and into our hearts.
When my husband and I were married in 2013 we knew we wanted to have kids. We planned to wait a while to enjoy each other's company before we got busy starting our family. During those first years of marriage, we began to grow more serious about our faith. One day I shared with my husband that I felt as if I had never experienced any serious obstacles in my life. I wanted to learn to trust God more, so I prayed that He would bring me an obstacle so that I might grow closer to Him and glorify Him for bringing me through.
Little did I know that this would be a painful request and would be the start of a long season of waiting.
In 2016, my husband and I finally decided we were going to try to start our family. We had been married for three years and my sister was pregnant. We thought it would be fun to have a baby around the same time so our babies would be close in age! We tried for a year and made the decision to get a medical opinion. After many rounds of tests, we found out that we had absolutely no chance of conceiving naturally—our only chance to have biological children was to pursue IVF.
We knew IVF was not an option for us. We made the decision to start saving up funds to pursue domestic infant adoption.
Fast forward to 2020 and our adoption was still pending. One day we came upon a video on the Gospel Coalition about embryo adoption. We had never heard of it, but once we started to learn more we knew God was opening a door to allow us to experience pregnancy and to have a family of our own. We found the Snowflakes Embryo Adoption Program. They spent time explaining the program to us and answering our questions. We decided to move forward with embryo adoption shortly thereafter.
Like any adoption process, it would take a while to get all the way through from start to finish. In December of 2020, we were matched with a beautiful family that wanted us to adopt their remaining embryos. We will never forget that day, and we will forever be grateful to God for this family. We transferred one of those embryos in May 2021, and in January 2022 we welcomed our son!
Even though the wait had some painful moments, we are so joyful and thankful to God for our son. Infertility helped us become patient; in our waiting we trusted God and He made this miracle possible. Through the whole process, my husband and I grew closer to each other and to God, and for that we are thankful. Our prayers were answered, and God has been faithful all along.
When I look back over the past 10 years, I’m in awe of God’s sovereignty, faithfulness, and grace.
Like many women, experiencing pregnancy and becoming a mom was something I dreamed about since I was a little girl. Coming from a relatively large family, I never thought we would struggle to conceive. Two years into marriage, we started trying. It wasn’t long before the months turned to years. The struggle dragged on and we grew weary. When two years passed with no positive pregnancy tests, we spoke with doctors. Initially our diagnosis was unexplained infertility.
Infertility is a deep, painful, and personal struggle. It changes you and your spouse in ways I’m not sure we fully understand. Infertility can either be a force that drives you to your knees and closer to the Lord and your spouse or it can be a trial that rips your faith to shreds and tears your marriage apart. My husband and I refused to let the enemy use this as a foothold. We’ve not been perfect in this journey, but thankfully grace abounds!
Three and a half years into our journey, we began fertility treatments. For six years, we went through failed medicated cycles, multiple surgeries, and four IUIs. Each surgery and treatment resulted in favorable reports from the doctors, but still our arms remained empty. During this time, the Lord began to stir our hearts toward adoption even while our desire to experience pregnancy continued to grow. Around this time, I learned about embryo adoption. Honestly, I was scared. What if we went all the way down this road and still ended up with empty arms? Emotionally, I wasn’t sure I could handle that. We were still bruised and grieving from failed treatments.
In February 2019, we attended the Waiting Well Together couples retreat. By this point, I had a burden for the millions of tiny frozen embryos whose lives are on pause. During the retreat, we visited with Toni. As we shared our story with her, she said something that switched on a light.
She said we can trust that God is sovereign over the lives of our children because they belong to him whether they come from our own bodies, through adoption, or some other way.
I still struggle with the “what ifs.” But 2 Corinthians says ‘to take captive every thought and make it obedient to Christ.’ So when the attacks from the enemy come, I strive to replace the lies with truth from God’s Word.
Last fall, we began the process to adopt embryos through Nightlight’s Snowflakes Embryo Adoption Program. There are many ways to go about embryo adoption. Some fertility clinics have their own programs, and there are specific agencies like Nightlight. We chose Nightlight for multiple reasons: they’re faith-based; we would adopt embryos from the same “batch” so all of our children would be genetic siblings (this is their goal with every adoption); and we could have an open adoption with the placing family.
Snowflakes is similar to a “traditional” infant adoption program. We went through an application phase including a formal agreement with the agency, physician approval, a family evaluation (similar to a home study), and creating a family profile. After the application phase, we entered matching. This involved extensive questions about our personal preferences to help in the matching process, the presentation of our profile to a potential placing family, reviews of the embryology report by our fertility clinic, and our review of the placing family’s profile. Once a match is accepted, couples move to the contract phase (embryos are considered property by law, so the contracts transfer ownership of the embryos). The next step begins with shipping the embryos to the adopting parent’s fertility clinic and then the medical process can begin. At this point, it’s like the last step of IVF, where we schedule a frozen embryo transfer (FET) that hopefully results in a pregnancy.
We had a sweet reminder of the Lord’s sovereignty and grace during our matching phase. Six weeks into matching, we asked for continued prayers from our small group. A dear friend prayed specifically that we would be matched that month. I thought, “Well there’s only one weekday left in this month, so that’s highly unlikely.” Less than 24 hours later, we got the news that we had been matched! Oh, did the tears of joy flow! Not just because we had been matched, but because God had been so gracious to answer our prayer even when our faith was weak.
As we read the placing family’s profile, we were amazed at the Lord’s sovereignty. We learned that the embryos we had chosen to adopt were made before Brent and I had even met one another! So all those years ago, God was already making a way for our family to grow. I truly believe adoption is not second best or Plan B. Seeing a timeline on paper that clearly showed how God had been working in our lives and His sovereignty over our family left us in awe.
We accepted the match at the beginning of June 2020 and adopted 8 embryos. We’re planning to have an embryo transfer this fall. We pray that our transfer is successful, that we carry to full term, and that we are able to have subsequent successful pregnancies. Regardless of the outcome, our hope is in the Lord and His faithfulness. We’re so thankful to have been given such a precious gift by the placing family and pray that our story is an encouragement to others. Whether you’re at the beginning of your story to grow your family or you’re neck deep in the sorrows of infertility, remember God is faithful. Cast your burden on Him, and He will sustain you (Psalm 55:22).
This story was original published on the Waiting in Hope blog.
Our fertility journey began when I was twenty-nine. After trying to conceive for a year, I was diagnosed with low ovarian reserve. After seeing several reproductive endocrinologists, in vitro seemed the most promising option moving forward. My husband and I are very outcome-focused people, so with motivated spirits we pursued two egg retrievals and one transfer, and within six months we were pregnant. We were thrilled to be expecting our first son!
When he was 2 years old, we began pursuing fertility treatments again. This time, we ended up doing three egg retrievals. Unfortunately, after each retrieval, there were no viable embryos to transfer.
I felt crushed, depressed, and hopeless. I thought I would never be able to experience pregnancy again. I had done everything by the book—the injections, medications, acupuncture, diet changes, you name it! I thought, “Why was this happening to us? Doesn’t God know our deepest desire is to grow our family?”
Little did we know, God had a completely different plan in mind!
After the epic IVF failure, we began to consider adoption. We applied with a large agency that specializes in domestic newborn adoption, but as I started to read more about the traditional adoption process, the more I started to have second thoughts. We had concerns about expenses being extremely high, the health of the baby (including prenatal drug exposure), and the idea that the biological mother could change her mind even after the birth. I have the upmost respect and awe for families who are called to adopt traditionally, but these concerns were just not sitting right with us.
Then it happened: Early one morning I woke up at 2:30am, thinking ‘Embryo Adoption.’
Not knowing what it was, I Googled it (of course!) and discovered Nightlight’s Snowflakes Embryo Adoption Program. It made so much sense to adopt embryos that have already been created and are waiting for a safe place to grow! I found hope that I could experience pregnancy again. My husband was on board, and we prayed fervently about it.
God answered in the most profound way, “Release my children,” He said to my spirit. The definition of release is ‘to set free from restraint, confinement, or servitude.’ We had our answer.
We moved forward with our motivated spirits again! We flew through the home study, doctor visits, adoption education, and other qualifications. Snowflakes prepared us that it could take a few months to be matched, but we were matched in just two weeks! God’s hand was indelibly in this process from the start to finish. We found out that we were pregnant with our Snowflakes Baby, our second son, about six months after beginning our embryo adoption journey!
It is amazing to me that our child was fearfully and wonderfully created across the country the same year we first started trying to conceive. We got to finish what our matched family started and I know without any hesitation that this child was meant for us, to be carried and nurtured, loved and prayed for, by our family. I got to experience the natural birth I always wanted and the invaluable rebirth of my motherhood. We are so blessed beyond measure!
At age 24, I was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. As treatment, I underwent chemotherapy and radiation to my chest. This was before egg freezing was used as a fertility preservation method, so instead I had an ovary removed and cryopreserved in the likely event the chemo would affect my fertility. Fast forward to my early thirties—I was feeling healthy and happily married to my husband, Phil. We began trying to conceive naturally but knew the odds were not in our favor. We had known for a long time that having our own children was something that might never happen, and it was something we discussed early in our dating relationship. Having a family was always a part of our plan for our life together, we just did not know how it would be created.
About six months after we began trying, I was unexpectedly diagnosed with breast cancer, which doctors think was a result of the radiation treatment I had for my lymphoma. Before beginning chemotherapy for the second time, we decided to try an egg retrieval and to freeze the embryos to use after my treatment ended. But the retrieval was unsuccessful. My reproductive endocrinologist told us that even through IVF we were unlikely to conceive.
We revisited our options after I finished treatment. We still had my frozen ovary and found a doctor in St. Louis who was successfully transplanting ovarian tissue resulting in healthy babies conceived naturally. We traveled for the transplant procedure in February 2017. The transplant proved unsuccessful, which did not come as a shock. We began researching adoption.
We started on the road of traditional adoption, but after discovering embryo adoption, we knew that was the right path for us. We would hopefully be able to experience pregnancy, and the joys (and pains!) of that unique process.
When we found Snowflakes, we grew comfortable with the process and realized this was the right organization to help us on our journey to start our family. One of the reasons was because of the focus they put on the placing families’ experience, and they consider how our relationship will develop with our matched family. In our home study education about raising a child through embryo adoption, we grew to think of them as family even before we were matched. Their unique and wonderful story is a part of ours and our child’s lives.
We have been on a long journey to expanding our family, and it is our greatest joy to have brought home a perfect baby girl in November 2019. We waited six and half years since my second cancer diagnosis to hear the news that we would be parents. And, funnily enough, she extended her debut as long as medically possible, entering the world 13 days past her due date and after 46 hours of labor! She was worth every second of that wait. We are in the process of planning our next transfer very soon and cannot wait to continue adding snowflakes to our family!
About 14 years ago, after having an irregular cycle my whole life, I was diagnosed with premature ovarian failure. Which basically means that for unknown reasons, I went through menopause early. After looking at my blood work, I believe my doctor’s exact words were, “You’re absolutely never getting pregnant.”
At 17 years old, that was heavy information to process. But looking back now, I’m thankful I had so much time to come to terms with my infertility. The finality of it was a “death” of sorts; I could grieve, process, and then heal. When I was dating Donny, my now husband, we were able to talk about what this would mean for our family and processed the realization that we would not be bringing biological children into the world together. We agreed we wanted children, and knew that adoption would be in our future.
A few years into marriage we got “the baby bug” and started researching adoption more seriously. There’s so much information out there! International, domestic, domestic private, foster-to-adopt and more! We were overwhelmed by the many pros and cons of each method…as well as the staggering costs associated with many routes. We eventually discovered the organization, Nightlight Christian Adoptions and the Snowflakes Embryo Adoption Program.
When family is complete after pursuing IVF, they sometimes have frozen embryos remaining that they don’t intend to transfer. This is can be for a variety of reasons—dangerous pregnancies, several successful pregnancies so adding more children isn’t practical, financial strain, etc.). What to do with these frozen embryos is a huge dilemma many families face. Snowflakes matches families who have remaining embryos that would like to place them with an adoptive family.
Embryo adoption was appealing to me and my husband for a variety of reasons… The costs associated are typically much lower than domestic infant or international adoption. There are thousands (if not over a million!) of frozen embryos currently in frozen storage in the U.S. And my infertility stems from my ovaries, my uterus could (theoretically) still carry a pregnancy, so I would be able to experience pregnancy and childbirth was a joy I’d never even imagined I could have!
We embarked on our embryo adoption journey in 2014. It started with many applications, forms, background checks, and meetings—all the usual steps required in a traditional adoption. Early in 2015 we received our first match! We adopted 8 embryos and started prepping my body for our frozen embryo transfer (FET). In an overnight shipping container, our precious embryos made the journey from Florida to our clinic in Pasadena. Our doctor thawed three embryos and 2 were viable for transfer. It was heartbreaking to hear we had already lost one precious life, but we were hopeful we would get the news we were pregnant with twins!
It takes about 2 weeks after an FET to get a successful positive pregnancy test, so we did our best to wait patiently.
The day I got the call from my doctor’s office that I was not pregnant, was one of the hardest moments of my life. I felt like my body had failed and that I had let these children and my husband down. Statistically, only 1 in three transfers are successful, so we knew there was a good chance it wouldn’t work on our first try, but it was still a deep loss we had to grieve.
We let my body heal for a few months, and tried again with our four remaining embryos. Once again, one of them did not survive thawing, and my doctor felt it was wise to transfer the remaining three. “Triplets!” We imagined to ourselves, “What an adventure!”
Two weeks later, we listened to the nurse’s sad voice over the phone, and again we had to process a huge loss. The idea that we had ushered 8 souls into heaven was both beautiful and heart wrenching. It was time to step back and evaluate everything. I could not imagine putting my body through the medication, then the transfer, and the loss AGAIN.
In the end we decided, the odds were in our favor. If 1 in three FETs are truly successful, we felt comfortable giving it one more final go. We jumped back into the matching pool with Snowflakes.
They came back with a unique matching offer—two separate families who each had one embryo to transfer. They asked if we would be interested in taking both. Once again, embryos were shipped to Pasadena, one from D.C. and one from Chicago.
We imagined the great stories of a twin pregnancy where the twins weren’t biologically related to us, nor each other… and this time when the phone rang, the nurse’s voice was joyful—we were pregnant! Words I’d never heard before! We still had a long journey ahead, since it was very early, but at that moment, I was pregnant!
At our first ultrasound there was one steady heartbeat. A healthy growing baby, and one more loss. All in total we had adopted ten embryos and one made it to pregnancy. But what immense joy in the one! Since embryo adoption is not a technical adoption in the legal sense of the word, the embryos were our personal possessions up until transfer, which means there was no finalizing the adoption, and it would be my husband’s and my name on the birth certificate.
On December 22, at 37.5 weeks pregnant, my son Deacon was born at a whopping 9 pounds, 12 ounces!
We have had a little bit contact with his biological family. We know they live in Washington D.C. and he has a big sister from the same batch of embryos he came from. I know that deciding to place their final remaining embryo with our family was a gut wrenching decision for them, and I don’t take their gift lightly. We often talk to Deacon about his wonderful family in D.C. who loved him so much they let me be his mama! As he gets older, we want him to understand his history, and allow him as much or as little relationship with them as he wants.
Today, it’s hard to remember life without Deacon! His head of crazy blonde curls, his precocious personality and his love of all things green have brought Donny and me more joy than I could have ever imagined! We grieved those early losses so deeply, but know that it was preparing us to parent this incredible child, and I would not change things for the world!
This story was originally published on the Shalice Noel Blog.
After four years of dating, Tim and Ellen were joyfully married in January 2013. They always talked about having children. Tim frequently joked that he wanted 2.5 kids (the national average). Ellen’s younger brother was adopted from Russia at the age of two, so adoption was a part of the couple’s discussion about building a family. What they didn’t realize was how soon adoption was going to play a role in their lives.
Married two years, they began having discussions about starting a family. They started by adopting their four-legged kid. One who is white with black spots, and has the cutest ears—their puppy Gus! He was the practice round for “real kids.”
Tim and Ellen began attempting to conceive a biological child in the fall of 2015. In March 2016, having had no success, Ellen made an appointment with an OBGYN. The doctors told her everything looked in order and added she expected, “to see her back in her office pregnant in no time at all!” Unfortunately, that was not the outcome.
While the couple was on vacation in July of 2016, they were listening to a podcast, and an ad came on for a Bible Club ministry in Eastern Europe. A thought clicked inside Ellen’s head, “I want to adopt from an Eastern European country, and I want to do it now.” Immediately, through the magic of the Internet, she began researching international adoptions. They discovered it was going to be extremely expensive. The reality of attachment and potential medical issues were also concerning to them. Tim and Ellen concluded that at ages 26 and 27, and one of whom was still in graduate school, international adoption needed to go on hold.
In October, Ellen confided about their struggles to conceive and the desire to adopt to a co-worker. She then told Ellen about a couple she knew who had adopted embryos and given birth to their adopted child. Immediately, Ellen was intrigued. She went straight home after work and, you guessed it, started researching!
Tim and Ellen were blown away! They thought, “What an amazing thing to be able to adopt children as embryos and to carry them in pregnancy!” They spent several months thinking and praying about how to proceed. Ellen communicated with women who had gone through embryo adoption. She listened to video blogs, researched agencies, talked with agencies, and read the book Souls on Ice.
Tim and Ellen were doing medical tests with a fertility clinic. Finally, a possible reason for their inability to conceive was discovered: Ellen had Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome (PCOS). The Reproductive Endocrinologist told them about intrauterine insemination (IUI), but they decided against it. “After getting the PCOS diagnosis, we decided embryo adoption was the right choice for us,” Ellen remembers.
Tim and Ellen considered three different agencies. All had great things about them, but they elected to work with the Snowflakes Embryo Adoption Program. They felt comfortable with the people they interacted with and were able to get answers to most of their questions answered upfront. Tim and Ellen confidence in the program grew after each interaction.
In April 2017, Tim and Ellen submitted their application to Snowflakes. Their home study was completed in about three months. Then it was time to enter the matching phase of the program. Incredibly, Tim and Ellen were matched with a placing family in 10 days. They needed some time to pause, think, and pray. Two days later, they gratefully accepted the placing family’s invitation to match.
Next came the adoption and communication agreements. Once the contracts were returned, signed, and notarized by both families, it was time to ship with embryos to their clinic.
“Our ‘embabies’ arrived at our clinic in December 2017. We expect to have our first frozen embryo transfer in January 2018. It’s amazing to think that less than one year from submitting our initial application we could be pregnant with our adopted child!
“We eagerly await the day of our transfer. We are eagerly awaiting the day we can feel them kick as my belly grows. We are eagerly awaiting the day we can hold them in our arms. We are eagerly awaiting the day we can tell them how much God loves them.”
UPDATE: We did have our first FET in early 2018, but it was unsuccessful. We had two embryos remaining. After taking a doctor-recommended break and spending some time healing, we decided to move forward with a second transfer with our last remaining embryos. This time, the transfer was a success and our son, Ryan, was born March 2019!
In December of 2020, God saw fit to bless us with a biological baby boy. It thrills me to think how it was not that we ultimately could not have a biological child, it was that Ryan was so obviously supposed to be part of our family and that his life is such an incredible blessing to us and everyone around him.
We are grateful for Nightlight’s Snowflakes program, and how God used them to bring us Ryan and the other three children we will not get to hold on this side of eternity. We are grateful to the donor family who entrusted us with the gift of these four children.
I recently recounted to Ryan again his unique journey to us, and his response was “I came home!” How right he was.
I never thought in a million years I would be pregnant with an adopted baby. That changed three years ago. My husband and I were struggling to conceive, so we went to an adoption meeting. When we learned about embryo adoption, we both were immediately intrigued. After discussing it and then talking with doctors, we decided to move forward. We contacted Snowflakes because we had heard they were a wonderful Christian organization to work with. We underwent educational training on embryo adoption and were eventually told we would be matched with an adopting couple who had donated their embryos. When the day finally came that we were matched, we looked at the donor’s profile and burst into tears. They seemed like such a wonderful couple (and surprisingly like us in many ways). We were excited and hopeful to adopt their five embryos, overjoyed by the possibility of our children having siblings!
The embryos were moved to a fertility clinic in our area. The first embryo was transferred—and it implanted! We were pregnant for five weeks until the clinic confirmed I miscarried. A few months later, we transferred another embryo and it too miscarried. We took tests in between transfers to make sure we weren’t missing anything my body needed for success. A few months later we transferred another embryo and it implanted.
We went in for our next ultrasound at six weeks and the doctor confirmed that there was nothing there except an empty sac. We were devastated that we had miscarried again. All these losses began to feel like too much for my body and way too much for our hearts.
We continued to update the donor couple along the way through Snowflakes. We wrote them a thank you letter for the embryos, but it was so hard to put into words our overwhelming sense of gratitude. How do you thank someone for this—the opportunity to be parents? Our donor’s responses back to us were always so selfless and supportive. We couldn’t believe they weren’t sorry they had donated their embryos to us after three of the five had died.
We were beginning to think none of the embryos would implant. We talked about giving back the remaining two embryos to focus on infant adoption; we thought my body just wasn’t accepting of these embryos. We wanted them to grow and mature and be born.
Our doctor said the last two embryos were “Day 6” which meant they took a little longer to develop. It also meant a slightly lower chance of implantation. We prayed and prayed for direction for a couple of months.
On my birthday, we were surprised to find out that one of my high school friends had adopted a baby girl. She sent us pictures—the baby was so cute! My friend was so happy to have grown her family so quickly. I had no idea she was even pursuing that, so it all felt so fast to me. It also caused Dan and me to reconsider pursuing infant adoption instead of embryo adoption. But we still felt drawn to embryo adoption. So, we decided to transfer the other two embryos. The doctor said it was okay to transfer them both at the same time. (This all had taken place over the course of about two years.) On the day of the last transfer we would ever have, we got this letter from the donor parents:
Dear Dan and Rachel,
Thank you for the beautiful letter. I have read it over and over, and it brings me to tears every time. I am amazed by your strength and your faith. I’m sure you can imagine the discussions and tears that went into choosing to put the embryos up for adoption. We prayed we were doing the right thing. The moment we were notified that y’all had been chosen as the parents, I had a deep sense of calm in my heart. I knew that God had led us to make the right decision.
When we get to heaven, it will be your face those babies are looking for. They have heard the sound of your heart beating from the inside, and it sang them a sweet lullaby of love.
As y’all prepare for your transfer today, I am praying for y’all, for your doctors, and for your tiny babies. You spoke in your letter about us giving y’all a chance. In truth, we are forever grateful to y’all for giving these embryos a chance.
Matthew 7:7: “Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you.” I ask God to give you a baby to love here on earth.
The letter brought us to tears. We didn’t want to let them down or feel another loss. So, we moved forward with the final transfer, knowing God would reveal to us what He wants.
When they tested my numbers several days after the transfer, they weren’t going up like they hoped. They hadn’t doubled. We had experienced this too many times before: the numbers start to go down and then I miscarry. I continued with all my meds, and they tested again in a few days. When the coordinator called, she was just as surprised as I was to tell me that not only had the numbers gone up, they soared! It had worked once again!
We were so happy and thankful—but at the same time, we had been at this point so many times already. We continued to pray and pray. We tried not to be too hopeful but to just trust in God’s plan. We believed that whatever happened, it would be God’s will and we would get through it with His help.
We went to our six-week ultrasound nervous with tears as we waited for the doctor. We had never made it through this milestone—the one where we could possibly hear the heartbeat. This time we heard it! We heard the heartbeat! Dan and I were both crying tears of thankfulness. From there we continued to see the doctor each week. Every week, the ultrasound showed a healthy, growing baby. (Sadly, we did lose the other embryo and look forward to meeting that child, too, in heaven.)
At 10 weeks we graduated from the fertility clinic and moved onto our regular OB physician. The OB doctor continued to care for us, and at 20 weeks, we found out we were having a boy. We were beyond excited and thankful to be this far and to have this opportunity.
On January 29, 2020, we finally met our son, Calvin. We continue to thank God every day for this baby. We feel like the luckiest parents in the world. God has blessed us beyond what we deserve, and we pray He will equip us to be the best parents we can be to this little guy. We will share his story with him right from the start. We pray he not only knows he has so many people that love him—donor and adoptive parents—but that he will, most importantly, grow in his faith, know Jesus as his Savior, and rely on God to lead and direct him—just as we were trying to do in our journey to meet our child.
September 2016—day one of our honeymoon. My wife and I decide to drive the Maui coast, along the Road to Hana. A multi-hour journey, hair pinned turns, and a day of reflection as we start our new lives and journey together. As we drive, we have our theme song on—Starship’s Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now. We have an mobile app assisting us, with the tour guide speaking to us about life, its purpose, and that the Road to Hana is more about the journey than the destination.
Our journey and a new chapter of our lives began that week. Like most, life is generally in sequential order and planned, and for my wife, she has always planned to be a mother. On this trip, we had hopes of continuing our journey of life and starting OUR family.
The honeymoon ended, months went by, and quickly we came to learn that starting a family would be harder than we originally thought. Patience…that’s what my wife kept telling me. But as time went on, our patience had grown to frustration. We kept quiet, wondering, broken, and numb.
Stepping in the door to the infertility center, we thought, “This won’t be so bad.” We will run some tests, find out the problem, and be on our way.
Days later, we got an alarming call from the doctor’s office. Sure enough, the test results came back and we were devastated. From these tests, it was determined our likelihood of having children on our own was very low.
We had so many questions, so many emotions, so many thoughts; it was overwhelming. Our world was crumbling around us, as we saw so many of our dreams never becoming a reality. We began undergoing fertility treatments to conceive, but after two failed attempts, we were left heartbroken and with a deep sadness.
We had many days of grieving and our desire to have a family was still very strong, so we began looking into adoption. Through this journey, we found Snowflakes Embryo Adoption. Instantly, we knew this was a perfect fit and one we wanted to pursue to build the family that we have always dreamed about. We felt that these embryos were our path to becoming parents.
In an attempt to take our mind off things (as we were trying to come to a big life decision), we went to see a new movie, Instant Family, which was about adoption (foster adoption, to be exact). The movie was great and very heartwarming. For those that have not seen it, I won’t spoil it, but in the end, the judge hits the radio and a song comes on. Not just any song, our song—the one Ashley and I play over and over—Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now. In that moment, we looked at each other, both of us wiping away tears. This was us. NOTHING’S GONNA STOP US NOW.
That week, we signed the adoption contract with the Snowflakes Embryo Adoption Program. We proceeded with ongoing paperwork, deadlines, and all of the required educational pieces. The FBI clearances, bank statements, marriage evaluations, educational pieces, all went by with a moment’s time. Now, we were ready for our home visit, and we were a nervous wreck.
Despite our nerves, the home study went perfectly, and then came the matching phase. At that point, we were three months in and were informed it would take months for us to be matched. Months turned into days, and God had another plan.
Six days. Yes, SIX DAYS later, someone selected us.
We could not have been more thrilled with how perfect a match it was. Our placing family is truly wonderful and has become family to us. We have agreed upon an open adoption and have truly developed a bond with them that is indescribable.
Next came the hard part, mostly for my wife—the embryos arriving at our clinic, the blood work, the injections, the tests, and the hormones. It was a whirlwind of emotions, and with guidance from our doctor, all went as planned and we were ready for our first transfer.
Transfer day was a day surrounded by love, God’s blessings, and even a little bit of humor. And, of course, our song playing throughout. We anxiously counted down each day. Oh, how the days slowly dragged on.
After the first BETA we received the phone call, one we once thought we would never get, telling us “Congratulations, you are pregnant!” Ashley had them repeat themselves multiple times because those words were music to our ears. I started crying, looking at her. “We did it!! YOU did it!” We knew we still had a long journey ahead, but in that moment, we were celebrating.
Now along our own “Road to Hana,” I am happy to report that my wife is 28 weeks pregnant, and I cannot be more excited. She is a brave, courageous woman, and without her pushing, I don’t think we would be where we are today. The countless injections, the sleepless nights, the tears; it was all worth it as we embark on the plan we were meant to take: Embryo adoption.
As this pregnancy progresses and our story unfolds, we become closer and closer to holding our little Snowflake Baby in our arms.
Embryo adoption is the source of our greatest joy and hope. It has given us the opportunity to grow our family in the most beautiful way.
Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now.
Photo courtesy of Portraits by Sharon.
This is Snowflake #656. He is not ours, yet he is fully and wholly ours. He is our little miracle, our Masen.
We tried to expand our family for 10 years. It started with fertility drugs, then several IUIs, then graduating to two failed IVFs. Shortly after the IVFs, I got pregnant naturally—twice within a year! Both ended in early miscarriages, with one testing to have had Down Syndrome. Sometime in the middle of this journey, we became licensed for foster care and seriously looked into adoption. We initiated the adoption process once our foster license expired, but the first organization shut down, then the second organization closed its Philippines Program (our preferred program) just as we had begun attending adoption classes and filling out the required paperwork.
Because another IVF would be out-of-pocket, I turned to other means—I religiously used a fertility monitor, got fertility acupuncture, improved my gag reflex drinking Chinese herbs, sought out chiropractic care, dabbled in fertility self-massage, yoga, and even tried an at-home IUI-type kit I discovered. We finally decided to do one more round of IVF, only to have an incomplete cycle because none of our embryos made it past day three. That’s when our doctor suggested an egg donor.
I receive Focus on the Family, a Christian magazine, but I never have time to read it. Soon after the last failed IVF cycle, for no reason at all, I casually flipped through the magazine and read about the Snowflake Embryo Adoption Program. Can you say Divine Intervention? There was no doubt—this was ALL God!
The program allows families to share their extra frozen embryos (from their own IVF cycles) with other families through adoption. These parents have completed their families through IVF but have remaining embryos. They don’t want to discard their embryos, but they also do not want these precious lives just sitting in frozen storage. Instead of just donating their embryos to their clinic, they choose to have them adopted by another family and go through a process very similar to traditional adoption. We got to have the best of both worlds—I was able to experience pregnancy and give birth to Masen, through the miracle of adoption!
Masen is not biologically ours, but is completely our son. He is an adorable Hapa Haole baby, who we thank God for every single day. He has two biological brothers who I hope he’ll want to meet one day when he gets older. He is our Snowflake, our blessing, our God-send.
While many friends and family know about our journey, there are still so many others out there who don’t know about this option. If you (or someone you know) are struggling with infertility or have frozen embryos you don’t want to discard, Snowflakes is an option!
There is a God who loves you, a God who has amazing plans for your life. Just like he had a plan for our family and Masen. He is a God of hope, restoration, forgiveness, peace, and love.
In 2016, after 8 months of trying and not being able to conceive, we found out we were unable to have biological children. We were absolutely heartbroken. After taking the time to grieve, we began to think through what the Lord would have for us next. We found Snowflakes Embryo Adoption and loved that it was like traditional adoption in the sense the placing family would be choosing us. We began our embryo adoption journey in March of 2017.
With the help of the Snowflakes staff, we went through each phase fairly quickly and that December, we received notification a family had selected us to adopt their five embryos. It was such a sweet, sweet moment for us knowing we had just said yes, Lord willing, to our future children.
In April 2018, our embryos traveled 2,000+ miles and arrived safely at our clinic. That day we got a call from the clinic medical director, letting us know that due to the device the embryos were frozen in, the probability of them surviving the thaw was small and they would not perform the frozen embryo transfer for us. We were told there was nothing we could do, that other clinics wouldn’t take them, and to call them once we had been matched again. We were heartbroken. We knew that we would fight for them until there was nothing left we could do. We boldly prayed that the Lord would move mountains for our precious embryos.
That next morning, we got a call from Snowflakes and were told that another clinic nearby would accept the embryos. We were blown away at the Lord’s kindness and reassurance. If we had known the first clinic we had chosen would not have accepted the embryos, we would not have matched with our placing family. But God had a bigger, better plan. The Lord in His goodness made a way for us to be these precious babies' parents.
Our first transfer took place in July 2018. The whole process was surreal. We had no idea if this transfer would take, but we prayed and hoped. We received a call from our doctor several days later, letting us know the transfer was unsuccessful. We had lost our precious baby—our child who was so graciously and sacrificially given to us, the child we had waited years for. We were reminded why we chose embryo adoption: to give each of the embryos we adopted a chance at life.
After taking the time to grieve and allow my body to rest, we went in for our second FET. When we arrived at the clinic, we were told they had to thaw two embryos that morning. Unfortunately, the first embryo fell apart upon thawing and was not viable. Again, heartbroken, we knew we would need to process this news. But due to our third embryo already being thawed and viable, we were motivated to move forward with the FET.
In September 2018, almost two years since we received the news that biological children were not an option for us, we got the call that we were pregnant! Words we never thought we would hear. We were in love with this sweet baby already and just in awe of the Lord’s kindness in matching us with this family. Our daughter was born May 25, 2019, which was 8 years to the month she was frozen as an embryo. We look back and we can see the Lord’s faithfulness over and over again. Even though we didn’t see it at times—He met us in mourning, in crying out, in the desperation, when we doubted, and when we celebrated and rejoiced.
We can’t imagine the emotions which have come with the sacrifice our daughter’s placing parents have made. We cannot adequately describe the gratitude in our hearts for the gift they have given us. We had a bracelet made for her biological mother, engraved with forever grateful on the front and five individual snowflakes inside—representing the five precious babies they gave us. Our prayer and hopes is this bracelet would be a daily reminder of the gracious sacrifice they made and their obedience to the Lord.
Our little girl is an absolute miracle and we thank God for her daily. We can’t wait to tell her the story of how the Lord made a way for us to be her parents. We pray the Lord would prepare her heart to hear it. We still hope and pray our two remaining embryos will transfer successfully and she will have genetic siblings in our family, in addition to the genetic sibling she already has who is being raised by her placing family.
When we first began our embryo adoption journey, the idea of having an open relationship with the biological family seemed daunting. However, after researching best practices in adoption, we were confident the best thing for our adopted child was openness. Even with that knowledge, we were uncertain of what that would look like once our child was born.
During the pregnancy, Nightlight facilitated the communication. But shortly after our son was born, I decided to reach out to Amanda (Corey’s placing mother) directly. Holding my newborn son gave me an instant connection to this woman I had never met. I wanted to know more about her story and let her know that I felt gratitude for her gift, as well as compassion for the mix of emotions she must have been feeling.
We messaged back and forth, shared Christmas cards, and became Facebook friends. This seemed like a simple way for them to see photos of Corey without trying to decide what they would want me to send directly.
In all honesty, I had not considered all the implications of being Facebook friends. Should I look through her photos? Seeing her children’s faces felt like glimpses into the future – Corey looks just like them! What was our relationship, really? Over time, the more we communicated, the more comfortable it became and the less important those questions seemed. Defining the relationship became far less significant than allowing it to grow naturally.
It was especially important to us that we provide opportunity for a relationship between Corey and his biological siblings. Although we wanted him to decide how that relationship would develop as he got older, we also realized that having them in our lives could alleviate the pressure of creating a relationship in the future.
We had known from the beginning they were open to meeting and his biological siblings were already aware of Corey and his unique connection. So, when Corey was 3, we decided to initiate a visit. We live in different states, so traveling to meet them was a big adventure for us on many levels. We knew Corey would not fully understand the relationship he has with these new “friends,” and went trusting that God would smooth out whatever bumps we created in our uncertainty.
I spent the flight wondering what it would be like to meet. What would we feel? What would they feel? We had arranged to meet at a restaurant in their home town, and when they walked in, it was like seeing long-time friends. Of course, there was much to learn about one another, but there was also an ease about it we had not expected. Over the next several days, we enjoyed our time together. Our children became fast friends, and we all left glad we took the risk of opening our hearts.
I’m still not sure we can define in simple terms what this relationship is, but we are all so glad to embrace it. The kids have remained pen-pals, and this year, they are all coming to visit us!
As our children grow, each will begin to grasp their story in a fuller capacity. But today, I am grateful for the gift of openness.
After getting married in June 2015, we believed, like most couples, that kids would naturally follow. We both had always dreamed of being parents, and the thought of infertility never crossed our minds. Our family even gave us baby items as wedding gifts! This is why we were so devastated when we received the news that Nick had male factor infertility and we would likely never be able conceive. We tried months of treatments, but to no avail. It became clear this was not God’s plan for us, and so we sought out alternative solutions.
When we attended our first information meeting at Nightlight Christian Adoptions, we believed we were there to begin the process of a domestic adoption. However, a new option was presented to us: embryo adoption. The idea was foreign to us, but also very intriguing. Tara yearned to carry her own child, and embryo adoption gave her that opportunity. When we went home that night, we asked for God’s guidance in making the best decision for our family that would also conform to His will. That Sunday we were sitting in church listening to a sermon when the pastor suddenly began to speak about adoption. It was almost as if he was speaking directly to us! We knew this was the sign we were looking for from God, and our minds were made up right there.
The matching process led us to a wonderful donor family with eight embryos. After Tara prepared for the transfer, we received news from our fertility doctor that all eight embryos had not survived the thaw. We were saddened and dismayed at our loss, but knew we had to persevere. Our second time through the matching phase resulted in a successful pairing with another amazing placing family. We accepted 11 embryos from them, and Tara began to again prepare for the transfer. This time, the first two embryos thawed proved to be viable! We implanted both, and nervously waited the two weeks to hear if we were pregnant.
When we walked into the fertility clinic and received the news that we were pregnant with twins, we experienced a joy like none other. We knew God had smiled upon us. Our happiness only increased when we discovered four weeks later during a sonogram with our new OB/GYN that our twins were in fact triplets! We knew that years of prayer had finally been answered, and we were prepared (or as prepared as you can be!) to tackle triplets head on.
During the 19th week of our pregnancy, our doctors informed us two of the babies were suffering from a condition known as twin-to-twin transfusion. In this situation, one twin is stealing blood and nutrients from the other, and it can be potentially life threatening for both children. The next day Tara underwent emergency surgery to correct the imbalance, which was successful.
During the 22nd week of pregnancy, Tara’s water unexpectedly broke. After rushing to the hospital, the doctor informed us that there was a 70% chance Tara would go into labor within the next few days, and if this happened, the pregnancy would be lost. It was the scariest news you can receive, but we trusted in God, and God again delivered. Tara would defy the odds and make it three weeks more before undergoing an emergency caesarian section to deliver two girls and a boy.
We were overjoyed to finally meet our three beautiful children, Judah DeVries, Macey Michelle, and Teigan Elizabeth. Each weighed under two pounds. However, tragedy would strike again, as our sweet baby girl Teigan passed away. There is nothing that can prepare a parent for the loss of a child, and we grieved our loss with our family. Although we would do anything to have her back, we were strengthened by our other two children. The three-month journey in the NICU was much like riding a roller coaster, with the highest of highs and lowest of lows, but ultimately resulted in us bringing home two healthy children.
Judah and Macey are now almost five months old and thriving. We could not be happier living each day with them and watching them grow and prosper. We know that we have Nightlight Christian Adoptions and embryo adoption to thank for making this possible. We will be forever in debt to all the wonderful people we have met and worked with along the way.
It is now our goal to spread the word about embryo adoption to as many people as possible. We believe that all life deserves a chance, and it is our hope that more people will hear our story and choose to pursue it as well. Although we have experienced grief, we praise God for Judah and Macey, and can’t wait to bring them another sister or brother some day!
We were given less than 1% chance of conceiving on our own. My husband, Steven, and I had been trying for a baby for five years. After years of nothing happening, we consulted a fertility specialist. This is a place we never thought we would go, and yet here we were. Due to our low chances, we decided to pursue IUI, and eventually, IVF. However, as these methods failed, it quickly became clear God was leading us in a different direction.
Our church has an Orphan Care ministry. One night, on a whim, we decided to attend a meeting about adoption and foster care. This is where we learned about the Snowflakes Embryo Adoption Program. We waited another six months or so and processed the loss of having our own child the “natural” way before God worked on our hearts to pursue embryo adoption.
The process from application to home study took us six months, and then we anxiously awaited a match. Thankfully, we were matched about a month later! It was a family in California who had created these embryos 18 years prior using an egg donor (so very little was known about the mother). They had two successful babies from the process who were now teenagers. There were 7 embryos left that had remained frozen since 1997, and we would be responsible for all of them.
My husband and I were on vacation in Alaska when we received the match. As we hiked along the beautiful trails of Denali National Park, we prayed about it. Then, we turned to each other and asked what the other thought. We both came to the conclusion that there was no reason to not adopt these embryos! Our desire more than anything was to pour into a child the love of Christ, and biology really did not matter to us. We wanted to share our hearts and our love with a child.
After completing the necessary legal process, we were the proud parents of 7 little embryos. We checked with every fertility clinic in Colorado (where we live) to see if they would accept the shipped embryos and help us with transfers—they all said no. So instead, we traveled from Colorado to California for the transfers. This actually ended up being a really sweet time where we were able to relax on the beach and enjoy time as a couple during each transfer time.
God’s hand was in the process—I happened to be between jobs when we went for our first embryo transfer. The doctor who performed the transfer was the same doctor who had frozen these embryos 18 years prior. Because the group of embryos that we adopted was older, they had been slow frozen at day 2-3. The doctor recommended that we thaw all of them, grow them to day 5 blastocysts, and then cryopreserve them to today’s standards. From the group of 7 embryos, only two survived the thaw and growth. Our first single embryo transfer went smoothly, and then we anxiously waited. When we got that positive test result, we were thrilled! Nine months later, we welcomed our precious and long-awaited son, Tyler, in August 2017. He was perfect and felt just as much like ours as if we had conceived him ourselves.
We still had one embryo frozen at this point, and we very much desired for Tyler to have a sibling. However, we knew this was up to God. We felt like we had already won the jackpot by getting Tyler as our son, so we knew that it was really in God’s hands if we would have another. This is when God put two things on my heart.
The first was the story of Hannah in the Bible, and how Elkanah loved her so much despite her infertility that he always gave her a double portion of any gifts. How much more does God love each of us?!
The second revelation was that no matter how our family’s story unfolded, He deserved to receive all the glory. So I prayed that no matter what, God would be in the spotlight- this is when I finally handed the whole journey over to God.
About a year after Tyler was born, we started planning our next embryo transfer. And then the unexpected happened…. we were pregnant on our own, without any assistance! The pregnancy went smoothly, and we were blessed with our precious and long-promised daughter, Hannah, in July 2019.
As the days and months passed, we still had this one embryo waiting. Steven and both knew that this little embryo deserved a chance at life just as much as any other. We prayed for this baby every day, along with our two beautiful children that we had already been blessed with. We scheduled the next embryo transfer, about a year after Hannah’s birth. Thankfully, this transfer went smoothly, and by God’s grace, we were blessed with another baby! Our son, Jayden, joined our family in June 2021. He is a full genetic sibling to Tyler, and he is perfect in every way. It is hard to believe he was frozen for nearly 24 years!
We are blessed to have a beautiful “extended family” with Tyler and Jayden’s donor family. Tyler and Jayden have 23-year-old siblings, Brianna and John. We have had the opportunity to get together in person with Brianna a few times, and we cherish this special relationship that our families share. It is such a special story, and we are so grateful that this family chose to keep these embryos around and allow us to be their parents. It is also nice that Tyler and Jayden have access to their genetic family, including personal relationships and health history.
God truly did make rivers in the desert and a way in the wilderness for our family. There were days that I wasn’t sure we would share our lives with one child, and here we are with three little children under the age of four! God knows how to paint a beautiful picture, and I know that our family’s picture is still being painted.
If you want to learn more about our family, we have a blog: snowflakesfromheaven.wordpress.com
Infertility was not on either of our radars when in the fall of 2016 we received confirmation: I have a low sperm count. We were stunned by the number--6 sperm, so specific! --and dismayed when months of treatment didn’t do much. (For those keeping score at home, we jumped from 6 sperm to 7. Wahoo.)
The worst of it was the feeling of isolation. Around us, our friends seemed to get pregnant with ease and pop out babies, and while some were more comforting to us than others, we felt like pariahs. For Chris, there was the sense that this somehow made him less of a man, less worthy of being a dad or around fathers. For Kari, having a baby was all she had really wanted in life. The thought of never having a child was the death of a dream.
We cried at dinner parties. We declined baby shower invitations. We became numb, the kind of numb that comes when you are terrified you may never again feel joy. The feeling of being completely alone was like suffocating under a great weight. We’ll never forget that feeling.
The stats, however, say we’re not alone. Far from it. One in 8 couples deal with infertility. That’s over ten percent of couples. For many, IUI or IVF is the answer. But for couples with severe male-factor infertility, like us, we aren’t considered good candidates for typical fertility treatments.
Doors kept shutting, one by one. Until, that is, we called Snowflakes Embryo Adoption after receiving a tip from Kari’s mom. They sounded kind over the phone. They gave us the first “yes” we’d heard in months. They sounded hopeful.
We talked with close friends and family about our decision, and in 2017, we completed the embryo adoption process and had our first frozen embryo transfer (FET). This resulted in a chemical pregnancy (or very early miscarriage) and once again, isolation reared its head. It told us we were dumb to hope. That we should give up. We didn’t know what to do.
But we tried again. And we’re happy to tell you that our second transfer has resulted in our son, 14 months old now, a wonderful child who is curious about rocks, likes to walk on his own, and keeps saying, “Dada!” even though we’re trying to teach him, “Mama!” We are grateful that the ups and downs of parenting are ours to have, despite the odds.
And the ups and downs can be YOURS, too. We know it might not feel like it. It might feel crazy, sad, weird, scary, frustrating. It might feel like another rabbit hole that goes nowhere. We’ve been there. And we know Snowflakes can offer hope.
We don’t feel alone anymore. Through infertility and embryo adoption, we’ve met so many amazing people -- adoption workers, medical professionals, and couples just like you. We’re excited to raise our kids alongside other Snowflake babies, to raise awareness everywhere we go about embryo adoption, and to hear more stories of people conquering isolation with hope and community.
January 5, 2004 was the day our family’s journey began.
We were young (only 19) and in love and we knew that we wanted to start our family right away. Adoption was part of the heartbeat of who we were from the very beginning and we knew it would play a big role in our family in the future. Stephanie had done missions work at an orphanage overseas so when we first got married, we both agreed that we would adopt.
Unfortunately, we couldn’t get approved at that time because of our age. So, we decided to pursue starting our family through natural means first. However, as the years went on, we were still unable to grow our family and we had to really evaluate God’s plans. It took some time, but after a few years we realized God had something different in store.
According to doctors, our struggles with conceiving and pregnancy were unexplained. We suffered a lot of loss and heartache over the years, yet we had to trust that God was in control. We knew He had placed a deep desire in our hearts to be parents so we chose to keep on trusting Him.
After nine years of praying and waiting, we were blessed to become the parents of our beautiful baby girl from Taiwan and bring her home in February 2013. She was such an answer to prayer and we were amazed at God’s faithfulness in blessing our family. Many times before we brought her home, God had given us promises and dreams about her and it was amazing to see it all come to pass! And even as we adopted and brought her home, the Lord continued to give us promises and dreams about the future children Stephanie would carry in her womb.
Four years later, we began to feel the leading of the Holy Spirit to pursue another adoption. We just weren’t sure where to adopt from. While waiting for the Lord’s guidance, He dropped a new journey in our laps: Embryo Adoption.
We had no idea it existed or what it was, but as we learned more, we knew this was for our family. God began to speak to our hearts, revealing to us that THIS was what Stephanie’s womb was saved for...these future babies. They needed a home and a chance at life.
After completing the home study process, we were matched with and adopted three embryos through the Snowflakes Embryo Adoption Program, and transferred our first snowflake baby in January 2018. It was such a miracle to have that experience and from the very beginning we felt our theme was trust and joy. Even during a difficult pregnancy, Psalm 91:4, constantly resurfaced, “He will cover you with his feathers. He will shelter you with his wings. His faithful promises are your armor and protection.”
We knew God was with us and with this baby. She was born healthy and beautiful in October 2018. It is such an honor to be able to be used by God in this way and to welcome her into our family. It’s been an incredible experience and we look forward to welcoming our other two little snowflakes into our family in the future!
“To appreciate the beauty of a snowflake, it is necessary to stand out in the cold.”
- Anonymous
The day we were diagnosed with infertility (and given very few fertility options) was such a dark day for us. In an instant, our dreams of becoming parents to genetic children vanished, and we felt so overwhelmed with that loss. While we were heartbroken and frustrated that we were given so few options, we see now how God was preparing our hearts for the family He had always intended for us.
Early in our research, we had come across the beautiful option of embryo adoption. The fact that you could carry and give birth to your adopted child seemed like such an amazing thing! So when we were faced with the reality that we would not have our own genetic children, we knew that embryo adoption was something we wanted to pursue.
We didn’t really know where to start in the process, so we knew we would need some guidance. We chose the Snowflakes Embryo Adoption Program, because they pioneered the process, and we wanted to partner with an agency that would uphold a high value on life. We are so grateful for our relationship with them. In each step of the process, we felt confirmation about our decision to pursue embryo adoption.
While we knew this was the path to a family we wanted to pursue, it was not without its own set of heartaches and struggles. We initially matched with a sweet donor family in our home state. We gave all the adopted embryos a chance at life, but unfortunately, we did not have a successful pregnancy. We were once again left heartbroken and frustrated, wondering if we would ever have children.
Nightlight was kind and gracious through the whole process. We did decide to rematch with another family, and soon we adopted more embryos. We welcomed our first 2 snowflake babies in November of 2016, boy/girl twins! They are our rainbow babies, the beauty of God's faithfulness after the storm.
We transferred another embryo in November 2017, but unfortunately, we had to say goodbye to that sweet little one. We tried again with our last embryo, and we welcomed our third snowflake baby in August of 2018! He is such a blessing and joy to us, and we love the fact that all 3 of our snowflake babies are full genetic siblings.
We will forever be thankful for embryo adoption because through it, we got to experience pregnancy and become parents. There will never be enough words of gratitude to express to the donor families for the gifts they provided to us by making the decision to donate their embryos and entrust us with their care. It is incredible to me how God was preparing our family, even way back in 2007 (when our first embryos were frozen), and then again in 2009 (when our second set of embryos was frozen). How He led my husband and me to each other, walked with us in our road of infertility, and led us to pursue embryo adoption. He allowed us to skip all other fertility options so that we would discover and then choose this unique path to growing our family. I believe this is part of the reason we had to walk the road of infertility- because God always intended us to be the parents of these precious little ones. We had to stand out in the cold for a bit so we could stand back now and be amazed at the beauty of the family God created for us.
Our family had no history of pregnancy or infertility issues.
When we began to add children to our family we immediately got pregnant. Unfortunately, the week we had our first ultrasound we discovered we were losing this young life. We were heartbroken! Our next pregnancy also resulted in a loss at 20 weeks. What was happening?
We decided to explore domestic adoption. After we completed all of the necessary documents and assessments, our posted profile was selected by a birth family quickly. We connected with one another and started to form a relationship that seemed solid – what could go wrong? However, after the baby was born the birth mother decided she wanted to parent. Circumstances eliminated our ability to get our family profile posted again. Our hope for a family felt out of reach.
As we grieved these losses we discovered we were pregnant much to our surprise! After a healthy and uneventful pregnancy our daughter was born.
A sister or brother (or more) for our daughter was our desire, but secondary infertility seemed to keep us from adding to our clan. Then we learned about embryo adoption through Snowflakes. It was very similar to our domestic infant adoption process and again we were surprised by how quickly we were matched with a placing family.
Our first two transfers were unsuccessful and we had no remaining embryos. We decided to go through the matching process with Snowflakes again. Ten embryos this time, which made us hopeful to have several siblings! I’m not sure why we had to go through six FETs before we had our Snowflakes baby, Slade – his name means ‘through/in the valley’. He is a beautiful, sweet baby and much loved by his big sister. We still have remaining embryos and hope to add to our family in the next year or two.
We always knew we wanted to have kids in our family. And we knew that they could come lots of different ways. So we always thought we would have our kids by our own genetics and that we would also adopt. And after we had our daughter, we knew adoption was what we wanted to pursue for baby number two.
We met with an adoption agency in Indianapolis. We remember they were excited to have us, but they were pretty honest that if we wanted to bring home an infant we could be waiting a long time. But they were quick to tell us about another option called embryo adoption. This was an adoption path were we would be matched with a family looking to make arrangements for embryos they were not going to use after going through IVF.
When they were explaining this to us, it felt like it was sci-fi! But during the car ride home from the agency, we talked and the option just felt right for both of us.
However, we were coming from a desire to adopt and we believe first families and genetic families are an important part of a child’s identity. Most of the clinics, if you receive “adopted” embryos, it’s anonymous. And we felt like, for us and our family and our future kids, that was not the best option. We wanted a connection to their genetic family, so we chose an adoption agency for our embryo adoption: the Snowflakes Embryo Adoption Program. We wanted the children who would come from the adoption to be able to know their story completely and have relationships with their genetic siblings if they wanted to.
The other reason we wanted to use Snowflakes over a clinic is because the Snowflakes model allows the genetic family (or placing parents) to choose their adoptive family. At most clinics, the adoptive parents choose the match. This was important to us because the placing parents created the embryos. They are theirs first. And they are the ones who should have that decision to choose whose they become.
We were first matched with six embryos, and over the course of two years we transferred those embryos. Sadly, those six embryos did not result in any babies. After that we took a step back to reflect on our journey. We had spent a lot of time, resources, and emotions on that match and those embryos and we still didn’t have our baby.
We remember those days of us being a little conflicted about what to do next. Do we move forward and match again? Do we try again naturally? Should we take a look back into traditional adoption? Our faith was a big part of our decision. We felt like there was a plan for us that was meant to be—there were other frozen babies out there somewhere, waiting for their forever home. So we decided to go back to find another match.
When a second family was considering us to adopt their remaining embryos, they had some additional questions for us. Their main question being, “Why are you adopting embryos when you are not infertile?” We knew they loved these embryos and they cared about them deeply. They were making an important decision. In the end, they chose us to adopt their embryos and we accepted.
On our first frozen embryo transfer with our new adopted embryos, we were pregnant right away! You could say we had a textbook pregnancy.
We have heard people say, “What you’re doing is go great by rescuing these embryos!” And yes, we are excited about it, but really the placing parents are the heroes. They are the ones that did something great, because had they decided to destroy their leftover embryos or keep them frozen, our baby would not be with us today. It was their decision that was life giving to the baby.
I got all choked up as I watched the little pin-pricks of light on the monitor in the doctor’s office. The way they appeared was a miraculous sight I will never forget. Not for Emily, though. All she could focus on was how much she needed to go to the bathroom! But that is what this journey through embryo adoption has been like every step of the way. Sometimes miraculous, sometimes hilariously human.
Our infertility story begins just like any other, racking up doctor’s office visits like you are filling up a punch card at Starbucks. Each time they wanted to try something progressively more invasive. Our work requires us to live overseas, which complicated the situation further. Expats like us squeeze as much medical care as we can into each trip home, but it was becoming increasingly clear that natural conception just wasn’t in the cards for us. We looked into traditional adoption, but the small African country where we live doesn’t have a domestic program for non-citizens, forcing us to look to international adoption in a neighboring country. This meant a long wait and a slim chance of adopting a baby. In the end, we decided we were open to adopting an older child who needed a forever family, while we mourned the loss of never getting to care for our children as infants.
That is when we heard about embryo adoption from a colleague and it answered all our prayers. It was a child in need of a family, it was the opportunity to know our child as a roly-poly baby, and it was a gift for my wife to experience all the messy beauty of carrying and giving birth. We raised money, we prayed a lot, we bought plane tickets, we got discouraged and crash-landed a few times into pints of cookies-and-cream and old reruns of the West Wing, but eventually we made it.
We adopted five wonderful embryos from the Snowflakes Embryo Adoption Program and transferred two of them. Later that day, we sat in a little taco joint where I forbade Emily from moving an inch and brought her all manner of salsa options. She teased me, as if her walking to the drink-dispenser would cause irreparable damage. It was obvious this whole experience hadn’t just been about our son, but it brought us together as well. It made us the kind of parents our little Noah needs and he made us the family we had dreamed of being all along.
I never expected to adopt. The concept wasn’t completely foreign—my wife, Julie, and I had discussed the possibility of adopting or fostering before we were married. But three years into building our family, we welcomed our first biological son, then a second, then a third.
God kept the door to adoption wide open, though. Our interest in embryo adoption began with Julie’s work as a researcher in an obstetrics lab. As part of her studies, she witnessed firsthand the amazingly complex design of each embryo. The experience convinced her each embryo is fearfully and wonderfully made (Psalm 139:14). It is not necessarily a culturally acceptable point of view, but it is our view nonetheless.
We also knew of families within our circle of Christian friends who had successfully adopted embryos. To be honest, the concept struck me as odd the first time I heard about it. When I suggested to my wife that we try for a fourth child, she replied, “Yes, but only through embryo adoption.”
Her comment took me off guard, and more than that, the conviction with which she said it. I’m not sure why. It shouldn’t have been a surprise given our history and our support of an adoption-funding organization that has helped many friends. I’m ashamed I didn’t appreciate the gift and honor of adoption back then.
I do now. More than ever.
Many families face infertility and remain steadfast in their faith throughout what I can only imagine must be a heart-wrenching journey. So why had God given us three of our own—yet planted the seed of adoption in our hearts? The answer was simple. We loved our biological children dearly, yet having come from large families, we had even more love to give.
By adopting embryos (we were blessed with three), we could give these children a chance at life. We made it clear to our prospective placing family in our letter of introduction that we had overflowing hope for these precious souls.
“Who knows what they might grow up to become—and how they might change the world for good,” we wrote.
God’s providence ensured everything worked out in an unbelievably wonderful way. If you are considering embryo adoption, let me encourage you: God works on His terms and His time. Trust it, pray about it, and go where you know you need to go.
Two years after beginning our adoption journey, we welcomed little Phoebe into our lives. She was the only one of three which survived the thaw. We committed to our incredible placing family that we would maintain an open adoption with regular correspondence and the possibility of an in-person visit in the future. Little did we know they lived less than two hours from our home, creating a perfect environment for nurturing a close relationship as our daughter grows up.
In short order, we began exchanging emails, following each other on social media, and generally sharing encouragement. Within two months of Phoebe’s arrival, our placing family had invited us over for a barbecue. It was a celebration I will never forget—of a family who loved its embryo babies so much that it kept them safe until the right time to place them; of our growing family finding its way with adoption; and of a strawberry-blond baby girl who fulfilled my wildest dream of being a daddy to a daughter.
Embryo adoption, as I imagine is true with any adoption, comes with risk and can be emotionally taxing. But if you seek children and the chance to demonstrate and receive love like never before, I urge you: Pursue it.
That clump of cells is a person. And that person will forever change your world for the better.
Nate is the author of the blog Thaw Your Baby: The Embryo Adoption Blog, where he shares practical embryo adoption tips and encouragement for couples seeking to adopt. You can also watch them speak about their adoption experience in the video Experience and Insights: A couple shares their embryo adoption story on YouTube.
I first heard about embryo adoption after my mother heard about it on a radio broadcast. It was 1997-1998 and the first embryo adoption program in the world, Snowflakes®, was in its infancy. Mom told me about what she had heard, and we hadn’t been married very long. I hadn’t even finished my degree. We hadn’t even determined to begin building our family – yet. Nevertheless, the idea of embryo adoption immediately captured my heart. I thought, “It’s incredible there are all these embryos in frozen storage, waiting, needing someone to give them a chance to be born.”
Being a mother, being a parent with Jeremy, was always part of our married future. In fact, I was 8 months pregnant with our biological son, Micah, when I crossed the stage to accept my doctorate in veterinary medicine. I loved being pregnant! I loved being a mom and was eager to have another baby shortly after Micah’s birth. Our daughter, Faith, had many health issues her first three years of life, some of them likely genetic, so when we started thinking about growing our family further, we turned our minds to adoption.
My parents had adopted three of my siblings domestically and my brother adopted two children internationally. But as much as I wanted to adopt, I loved being pregnant. Embryo adoption allowed me to adopt and be pregnant at the same time. It also fit our strong pro-life ideals that life begins at conception and deserves respect and protection from the moment of fertilization. Jeremy took some time to research and understand this truly unique adoption choice called embryo adoption, but once he said “yes,” he was fully committed.
We officially applied to the program in May 2007. We requested to be matched with a placing family who might have remaining embryos that would potentially be more difficult to place. A family with nine remaining embryos determined to place their embryos with us! These were multi-ethnic embryos – Hispanic/Japanese/Caucasian – and we were overjoyed because we already lived in an extended family with ethnic diversity through adoption. Our adoption contracts were completed in February 2008.
In April, those nine lives were shipped from California to our clinic in Pennsylvania. We scheduled our first frozen embryo transfer. The first transfer of two precious embryos was June 26, 2008. The result was bittersweet: one of the embryos, Peace, went to be with the Lord, while the other embryo continued to thrive. We met our adopted daughter, Grace, in March 2009.
When we originally considered adoption, we were thinking one or two more kids in our family would be perfect. But, after the birth of our daughter Grace, we knew our hearts belonged to all seven of the remaining embryos we adopted and we wanted to keep all of the siblings together. We determined to schedule a frozen embryo transfer of two embryos every 2.5 years until all the embryos were given the opportunity to become all that God created them to be.
Our second transfer, in March 2011, resulted in the birth of our twin boys, Isaac and Isaiah. In December 2013, we had our third transfer and in August 2014 we had our second set of twin boys, Jeremiah and Josiah - who are doppelgängers of the first set of twins! In August 2016, our hearts were broken when we lost our two babies, Charity and Trinity, during our fourth transfer. Our one remaining embryo had been waiting for 13 years to have his birthday. In May 2017, we welcomed Ezekiel into our family. His name means ‘God strengthens’ because God gave him the strength to be here after the many years of waiting.
Our family is abundantly blessed. Although not in our original plan to be such a large family, we are delighted and filled with joy as we parent each of our children. We appreciate each unique person who is a part of our clan and how we work together to accomplish life as a family. The fact that we have two sets of twins often starts conversation about embryo adoption wherever we go and my six Snowflakes are evidence that each embryo is a unique, genetic individual worthy of dignity and every chance at a real life.
Photo by F2 Photography
Hannah Strege is a 19-year-old college freshman with a brilliant smile, big dreams of becoming a social worker — and an origin story that’s kept her in the public spotlight since she was no bigger than a grain of sand.
Life began for Hannah Strege, as it now does for tens of thousands of children every year, in a laboratory dish, where she was one of more than 20 embryos created during a routine cycle of in vitro fertilization (IVF).
This popular treatment for infertility combines male sperm with female eggs in a controlled environment before introducing one or more viable embryos into a woman’s womb. To increase the odds of a successful pregnancy, doctors often create many more embryos than can responsibly be transferred at one time. This allows a couple not only to select the most promising embryos for transfer, but also to have backup embryos should the first attempts at implantation fail. The dark side-effect of this common practice is an enormous surplus of unused embryos — estimates range from half a million to as high as four million in the U.S. alone — frozen and waiting for a chance to grow and be born.
For many of these tiny children, that chance never comes. They are destroyed, donated to scientific research (that is: destroyed) or kept on ice in near-perpetuity while those responsible wait to decide what to do with them.
Her future uncertain, Hannah’s state of frozen limbo might have continued indefinitely had a pair of unlikely heroes not come to her rescue.
John and Marlene Strege didn’t set out to become groundbreaking pioneers. They simply wanted to welcome a child into their family.
Infertility issues, however, left them with few options — none of which was especially appealing to them. Doctors recommended IVF with donated eggs, but the Streges were deeply uncomfortable with the idea of using the eggs of another woman, thus conceiving a child outside of their marriage bond.
They also worried about what would happen to any unused embryos.
“John and I both grew up in LCMS schools and churches,” said Marlene Strege. “So we always knew that life began at fertilization and that God is the Creator of all life — not doctors.”
“These embryos truly are ‘the least of these,’” she said, referring to Jesus’ words in Matthew 25, “as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.”
It was this concern that led them to ask about a previously unheard-of possibility: embryo adoption.
“What would God think about embryo adoption?”
This was the burning question that John and Marlene wanted answered before they were willing to consider moving forward with the pioneering procedure. Indeed, it’s a question that continues to trouble the minds of many life-loving Lutherans to this day.
Seeking answers, Marlene decided to reach out to four people she thought might be able to help: the Rev. Dr. Charles Manske, founding president of Christ College, Irvine, now Concordia University, Irvine; the Rev. Dr. Samuel Nafzger, then head of the LCMS Commission on Theology and Church Relations (CTCR); the Rev. Robert Dargatz, then assistant professor of Religion at Christ College and a member of the CTCR; and Dr. James Dobson, then head of the evangelical media ministry Focus on the Family.
“All four agreed,” recalled Marlene, “that if the original family was not going to go back and get the embryos, they needed to be adopted.”
Their response mirrored the official finding of the CTCR, expressed in its 2005 document “Christian Faith and Human Beginnings: Christian Care and Pre-Implantation Human Life”:
We consider that respect for human life can also be expressed by making embryos available for adoption by couples willing to provide the opportunity for life.
Bolstered by the assurance that this course of action would be God-pleasing, the Streges began to explore embryo adoption seriously.
The “embryo” part was easy. Their fertility doctor had access to any number of frozen embryos they could request. It was the “adoption” part that turned out to be much trickier.
At the time, embryos were (and in most states, still are) legally considered property, not persons. As such, they could easily and simply be donated — but adopted? In 1997, the necessary regulations and procedures simply didn’t exist.
The Streges were clear, though: They wanted to pursue an open adoption, whatever it took.
Guided by a friend at Nightlight Christian Adoptions, the Streges began to navigate California’s complex web of adoption requirements. They tackled mountains of paperwork, submitted to home studies and visits with social workers, and identified a family — Hannah’s — that was willing to place their embryos in an open adoption. Along the way, the Streges lost both their infertility doctor and their health insurance coverage for the procedure, paying for their adoption and medical expenses out-of-pocket with a providential windfall that arrived when John (a sports writer) sold a biography of then-up-and-comer Tiger Woods.
At long last, in the spring of 1998, the Streges’ adoption was finalized, and 20 frozen embryonic children were Fed-Exed to John and Marlene in Pasadena.
Then came the hard part. The scary, heartbreaking part.
Twelve embryos were thawed in succession. Only three survived the thawing process, and although all three were introduced to Marlene’s womb, not one of them successfully implanted.
Their nerves raw, John and Marlene waited anxiously as the remaining eight embryos were carefully thawed out on Good Friday. Again, only three survived, but of these three, two appeared to be fully viable. They were transferred to Marlene on Holy Saturday.
After one more anxious wait, the Streges finally had the good news for which they’d been waiting and hoping for more than a year.
“The doctor’s mouth just dropped when he saw the ultrasound,” said Marlene. “He determined that there was one baby, with one heartbeat, and he called it “a textbook implantation”.
“It was total excitement to find that I was pregnant.”
Hannah — her adoptive parents’ “gift from God” — was born December 31, 1998, the first-ever child to be born through embryo adoption. Her parents and Nightlight Christian Adoptions dubbed her a “snowflake baby,” reflecting her origins as a tiny, frozen, yet utterly unique human being.
Not every family with small children testifies before the U.S. Congress, but that’s what John and Marlene were called upon to do in July 2001. Scientists had recently discovered how to extract stem cells from unwanted embryos (destroying the embryos in the process), and lawmakers were grappling with whether or not to allow federal funds to be used for this controversial research.
Toddler in tow, the Streges stood before Congress to testify against embryonic stem-cell research.
“At that time, they were saying that these frozen embryos have no purpose,” said Marlene. “They’re in excess of clinical need. They’re extra. They’re leftover. They’re just going to be destroyed anyway, so let’s do research on them.”
The Streges’ testimony stood in stark contrast to this point of view, highlighting the humanity and dignity of all embryonic children and the need for them to be adopted and cared for in loving homes.
“It put a face to this topic,” said Marlene.
Five years later, in 2006, the Streges again traveled to Washington, D.C., to stand behind President George W. Bush for the first veto of his presidency. He used it to block the Stem Cell Research Enhancement Act of 2005, a bill put forward to ease restrictions on federal funding for embryonic stem cell research.
Twenty years after Marlene’s long-hoped-for pregnancy, Hannah is a young woman on the threshold of adulthood, and her parents are adjusting to life in their newly empty nest.
“We are, all three of us, transitioning into a new season of life,” said Marlene. “We have such fond memories of Hannah’s childhood, in part because she had a wonderful Lutheran school to attend preschool to 8th and then a great Christian high school.
“However, this new season is also bringing new opportunities particularly for Hannah. It is so exciting to see the wonderful things God is doing in her life and the opportunities that are coming her way!”
Across the country, other snowflake families are now following the path first blazed by the Streges. Some 1,500 snowflake adoptions have taken place over the past 20 years — over 500 of these facilitated by Nightlight Christian Adoptions, which has since become the nation’s “leader in Snowflakes® Embryo Adoption.”
Allison and Brent met at their church, and two years later were married! Then baby-fever hit. The original plan to wait a year to start a family changed quickly. Their attempts at pregnancy success in that first year culminated in the sad diagnosis of infertility. That was a huge change in the plan! Thankfully, Allison and Brent were sure that God’s plans for them weren’t changed! They were exactly where He planned for them to be.
They had already discussed adoption even before they were married. They knew there were other paths to having children. One of Allison’s co-workers learned about Allison and Brent’s interest in adoption and told her about embryo adoption. Allison went home that night, excited to tell Brent about this unique adoption alternative. As they learned more, they prayed and they talked it over with trusted family and friends. They were convinced this was the right adoption choice for them and applied to the Snowflakes Embryo Adoption Program.
The adoption process started in March and ended in early autumn. They were matched with a family who gifted them with seven embryos – they were thrilled to adopt them!
The first frozen embryo transfer occurred in December with no resulting pregnancy. They had a second FET in April, but again, no pregnancy. With just three embryos remaining they scheduled their third transfer in June, thawing two of the embryos and successfully transferring one. The test was positive! They were going to have a baby in February!
But, the joy expected in February ended in a miscarriage at seven weeks. Heartbroken and devastated at their loss they continued to trust in God’s faithfulness.
In late November, they scheduled a FET, using their last remaining embryo. The embryologist was uncertain this embryo would even survive the thawing process. Their affectionately named “Bond Baby” (named after Brent’s love for 007) proved them all wrong! Two weeks before Christmas they received the news they were pregnant and due in August.
Their sweet and precious miracle daughter, Adleigh, was born on August 1. What joy and wonder she has brought into their lives – the best gift EVER! They are forever thankful to God and to the donor family for the gift of her life!
Rachael and Pete were hoping to have children, but they found out quickly having babies may not be as easy as they expected. Fertility treatments lead to the birth of their first son Samuel and then a devastating miscarriage. Instead of continuing down the path of fertility treatments, they decided adoption would be a better investment of their resources. They chose to apply with Generations Adoptions, now a division of Nightlight Christian Adoptions.
After completing their home study, they were approved for a domestic infant adoption. Then they waited…, waited..., and waited...
The waiting was very difficult, but while they waited, God was working in their hearts. “I had not been feeling ready to face the significant chances of losing children who did not survive the thawing process, a risk associated with embryo adoption. But over that year, I became convicted that taking serious emotional risks is sometimes an important part of answering the call to love one's neighbor as one's self,” Pete remembers. After a year, it was time to renew their home study, and they decided it was time to switch from domestic infant adoption to Nightlight's embryo adoption program, Snowflakes.
It took a few months to be matched with a placing parent who had five remaining embryos. The donor had read their family profile and selected them as a possible match! Rachael and Pete spent a weekend considering and praying fervently about this match. They decided their answer was, “yes!”
The couple completed the embryo adoption in October of 2015 and in December traveled to New York City for their first frozen embryo transfer. One of the two embryos thawed did not survive, but one did, resulting in the birth of their son Owen, Snowflake baby #487.
The relationship with their adoptive son’s placing parent at the outset managed by the Snowflakes staff. Over time both families have become open to more direct contact, and Rachael and Pete will meet her when they travel to New York for their next transfer.
People frequently ask Rachael, "What was it like being pregnant with your adopted child?" Her response, “Honestly, it was a whole lot like being pregnant with our biological son! I had a nurse at one doctor’s appointment get very confused as I was nursing Owen and telling her that my family medical history wasn't pertinent for him because he is adopted. We had one friend who commented, ‘Wow, this is very 21st-century stuff!’ It really is fun to get to explain Owen is adopted, but that I did give birth to him.”
Parenting Owen has been a lot like parenting Samuel, their biological son. Owen needs just as much directing, teaching and correcting as his brother did. And it’s such a privilege to be the parents to both of these boys, despite the different ways they joined our family. “It’s not DNA that makes a family, it a choice to love and unconditionally accept these children as our own.”
Rachael and Pete are so thankful for Nightlight Snowflakes embryo adoption program and the role that they have played in bringing these children into their family.
Our family building journey has brought us nothing but joy and happiness! Unfortunately, it did not start out that way. We had one son we were certain we wanted more children. After three miscarriages [a genetic incompatibility factor], we decided to discontinue our attempts to conceive another genetic child. We decided to explore adoption as a means for growing our family. We first tried domestic infant adoption, but that lead to additional heartbreak.
We were determined to bring another child into our home – we have so much love to give! One day, I was sitting at my computer, and I decided to type ‘I want to have a baby!’ into the search bar. The Snowflakes Embryo Adoption Program was the first item in the search results list!
Like many people, we had never heard of this option before. What a strange and foreign concept! I called Snowflakes and gathered as much information as possible. The more I learned, the more I knew that this was the answer to our prayers. Full speed ahead! I submitted our application and honestly, I’m not sure my loving husband had actually processed what we were pursuing yet.
We completed our home study and selected a clinic. We waited as patiently as possible for a family to choose us to adopt their remaining embryos. Our first match didn’t work out. It was incredibly disappointing, but we received lots of encouragement from the Snowflakes team. Quite quickly we were selected by another placing family who had four kids through IVF. After the adoption was finalized we had snippets of contact with the family mediated by Nightlight. The family answered some question we had and sent pictures of their whole family.
We had our first embryo transfer. We transferred one embryo and learned we were pregnant. Joy! Happiness! Apprehension. Would the pregnancy stick? It did and the entire pregnancy was incredibly smooth—absolutely perfect. We decided we wanted to reach out to our placing parents and see if they would like to exchange email addresses. This led to us exchanging phone numbers. After texting, talking emailing we established a wonderful, personal relationship between us. We felt blessed and honored they chose us to be able to give one (and someday more) of their embryos a chance at life.
The Christmas after our embryo adopted son was born, both families agreed to meet at a hotel. As the family who gifted us with embryos came into the hotel lobby, I felt an instant connection. I was holding the baby they created; the baby they blessed us with. It is extraordinary to think that before any of us knew each other, or even were born ourselves, God had a plan. God knew this baby and He knew he would be a part of our family.
I hope our journey as ‘extended family’ has only just begun. The joy and happiness we feel now can only continue to grow!
JV and Cathy Kennedy were married young and had big dreams of building a large family. When they had a miscarriage on their first attempt they were heartbroken. Then Christian was born followed by three more losses before Cambria arrived. Between the births of their son and daughter, the couple pursued testing, but despite visiting every fertility doctor in their area, they found no answers.
After suffering two more miscarriages it became clear the trouble was something genetic and the couple made the decision to adopt.
A workshop about the different adoption programs that their agency offered introduced them to the idea of embryo adoption. It wasn’t until the social worker was doing their home study, however, they began to give the idea some thought. Cathy recalls the social worker saying, “Oh, so embryo adoption might work for you too. Why didn’t you decide to do that?”
The question made them pause and consider their options again. JV explains, “We were afraid it was something that wasn’t safe for us – or not as safe for us as domestic adoption. After having so many losses we really just wanted to take the route that seemed the most guaranteed to bring us a baby.”
Cathy went to the doctor for yet another consultation. She came home with no new answers, but with a lightbulb, that embryo adoption seemed like a really good option.
After investigating and having their concerns alleviated they pursued embryo adoption with cautious elation. "When we thought about embryo adoption more seriously, we realized it was a way we could experience pregnancy. We got the blessing of adoption as well as feeling them move inside my body as they are growing. I would be able to nurse them after they were born. What could be better than that?”
Cathy got a referral to a doctor who not only had worked with Snowflakes before but was also willing to do a natural cycle with her. “There wouldn’t be the shots, which was a huge fear of mine.”
Three embryos were transferred to increase the couple’s chances of success. On the first ultrasound, they saw two heartbeats. In due time, along came Caden and Cooper, fraternal twin boys.
Not feeling their family was complete, the family had four more transfers and matched with another placing family before along came Cole. “He was the last of the seven embryos we were matched with to stick,” Cathy says. “He’s our healing boy".
“People always ask us how we will bring it up – we will be honest with them from forever. I made this scrapbook which tells the story of their conception, of being matched with us, their whole journey from being embryos to being in our family.” The Kennedys often pull out their children’s story and read it to them. It’s a warm celebration. “We couldn’t imagine life without them.”
When Matt and Charlie DeVore got married, there was no question they would be parents. Matt had always dreamed of having a big family with five kids. But getting to that first baby seemed impossible. Charlie struggled to get pregnant. After unsuccessful fertility treatments, the couple was matched in a domestic adoption. Everything looked final, but then at the last moment, the adoption fell through when the birth mom changed her mind. After ten years and $35,000 spent in their attempts to build their family, Charlie was trying to accept the idea that she wasn't meant to be a mom. "I think I went through a lot of emotions. I was just broken. I felt like a broken person," she recalls.
The couple didn’t have the finances to try again and Charlie was left wondering and trying to decide if she could just walk away.
Then Matt’s uncle died in a car accident, so the couple drove to be with the rest of his family. Matt’s uncle was a farmer and had buried money in buckets. Part of the time spent together as a family was spent digging up the farm to find the inheritance he left behind. Everyone thought Charlie and Matt should have the first bucket to try again and have a baby.
Matt’s sister, Julie, volunteered to be a surrogate. But Charlie’s eggs had been problematic and didn’t get large enough to fertilize. They were beginning to feel they were out of options. That’s when Julie came back to suggest embryo adoption through Snowflakes. Charlie and Matt had never heard of it.
They were matched with a placing family welcomed a little girl into their family through donor egg IVF. Afterward, they conceived naturally and decided to donate their remaining embryos through Snowflakes. They chose the DeVores.
Julie carried the pregnancy for Charlie and Matt and gave birth to her niece, CJ. "Right away she held on to Matt's finger," Charlie reminisces.
CJ will know the other little girl - her biological sister - born from the same batch of embryos. And the DeVores will make her a book of her life story, so she knows all the people it took to make them a family and to erase their heartache.
"You know, she may not understand it all, but so she grows up with it. It's never a shock or something that's a secret," Matt said.
The struggle and the hurt feel long ago. "There's nothing left of that," Charlie smiled. "It's just a complete joy having her. Our dreams. Our dreams are right here."
The first time we saw our oldest son smile after tickling him, it melted our hearts.
Our oldest son. There are times we’d never thought we’d say that. Our son. After years of trying to have children – going through rounds of natural attempts, then rounds of IUI and IVF, and finally having a doctor say that it was just not possible – we turned our hearts toward adoption.
We’d always known we wanted to adopt at some point in our family. We’d talked about it and laid out a path for us – have a child or two of our own, then go through a traditional adoption to add to our existing family. Although the desire to adopt had been on us, God did as He often does; showing who is truly in control when our plans are confounded and His plans are revealed.
Matt’s parents had been volunteers at Focus on the Family in Colorado Springs, and through Focus, we’d learned of embryo adoption and Nightlight Christian Adoptions and the hundreds of thousands of homeless snowflake babies waiting in frozen orphanages. We again felt the call of God on our lives, so we jumped into the process.
That process was challenged by our military duty location at the time, assigned to the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv, Israel. How were we going to find a certified social worker in Israel to do a home study? How would we track down a way to complete our background checks? And if they wouldn’t ship embryos overseas, how could we even do the transfer? One by one, God opened these doors, resolving each problem and making it clear that this is what He’d intended for us.
As we returned to the US, we found ourselves stationed at Ft. Bragg, NC, one of only a handful of bases with a military doctor who specialized in infertility and could administer the medicine protocol and perform the transfer. Out of dozens of possible locations to be stationed, God put us in the one spot that had the right doctor at the right time.
And that’s when the right family came along and selected us to adopt their little ones, a family with 20 frozen embryos and two successful births of their own. Nightlight Christian Adoptions brought us together, the embryos were shipped, and the military doctor performed the transfer at the tail end of Matt’s deployment to Baghdad in Iraq. Returning home, he joined me a few days later at the doctor’s office only to learn I was pregnant. The homecoming was complete in every way. God had taken us so far on this journey through the wilderness of infertility. He had taken our desires and bent them to His own.
On May 13th (a most special Mother’s Day present
), our twins were born – Jackson and Cade – crying and beautiful and alive. As alive that day as they had been eight years earlier when they were conceived. Now adopted, they were a part of our family, and we were humbled and honored to care for and raise them.
Travis and Annette both dreamed of having a big family someday but knew the only way they would be able to expand their family was through adoption.
Travis had leukemia when he was a child and after eight years of extensive and grueling treatment he beat the disease, but it left him unable to have children. When they were ready to start a family, they decided to adopt internationally from Guatemala. Their first child, Cornelius, was adopted in February 2007. Sadly, when they wanted to bring home a second child, Guatemala had closed its doors to international adoptions. They decided to look more extensively into other forms of adoption, including embryo adoption.
Travis and Annette decided to apply through the Snowflakes Embryo Adoption program. The couple first matched with a family that had four frozen embryos. However, when they were ready for the frozen embryo transfer (FET), the doctor informed them that only two of the embryos survived the thaw. The remaining two were transferred but, unfortunately, a pregnancy did not occur. Both Annette and Travis felt a great sense of loss not only for the two transferred embryos but also for the embryos that did not survive the thawing process.
The couple strongly believes that life begins at conception. For them, losing these embryos was the same as losing a newborn baby. Travis and Annette courageously decided to try embryo adoption again. They matched with another family who had four remaining embryos. This time, Annette became pregnant! Their son Corbin was born early in 2011. In 2013, Travis and Annette went through the embryo adoption process for the third time and matched with two families: one with two embryos and one with three. This unique match resulted in a twin pregnancy: Cadence and Coralee, who were born late 2014.
Travis and Annette strongly believe in openness with their adopted children. The family has a relationship with their daughters’ biological family, sending updates and pictures of the twins as they grow, and leaving the door open to any potential questions the girls might have in the future.
The relationship has been so beneficial and valuable to the family that the couple wishes they could have the same relationship with their sons’ biological family. They are diligent in their efforts to help each of their children understand how they came to be a member of the family. Travis and Annette love their big family and are not opposed to it becoming bigger still. According to them, they have never had so much fun and would not want to live their lives any other way.
PHOTO CREDIT: Bethany Graham Photography http://www.photographybybethany.com/
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While in college, David and Renee met during a mission trip in the states. Smitten, David transferred to Renee's college in North Carolina and they decided to pursue a relationship. They married after dating for a couple years. Of course they wanted children – eventually and after five years of marriage decided to start expanding their family.
“Renee was able to get pregnant rather quickly, but unfortunately soon into that pregnancy she miscarried,” said David.
Renee’s physician discovered she was in pre-menopause. It would be highly unlikely that they would ever conceive again on their own.
Even before attempting pregnancy the couple had considered adoption, but never a specific type of adoption program. Renee was working as an adoption social worker and decided to inquire about domestic adoption through the agency she worked for – which ‘happened’ to be Nightlight Christian Adoptions. The Executive Director of the agency discussed domestic adoption with them and then asked, “Have you ever considered embryo adoption?”
Embryo adoption? Get pregnant? Carry a baby and give birth? It seemed too good to be true! Renee had never lost the desire to carry a baby and doctors could find no reason she couldn’t.
With eager hearts, David and Renee started down the path of a Snowflakes embryo adoption. They completed a home study and created a profile. They were matched with an out-of-state couple who had 12 embryos to gift to them. The donors had three genetic siblings from this same set of embryos.
“They choose us and we choose them,” said Renee.
Six embryos were thawed. Four didn’t survive. Two were transferred to Renee’s womb. About a year and a half after beginning their adoption search, Renee gave birth to their daughter.
They named her Hannah Faith. Hannah, because it means grace. And Faith, because, as Renee says, “Of the journey that it took for us to get her here after all these years.”
“I truly believe that God had her set apart as a little embryo for our family,” said David.
Hannah’s story won’t be a secret. Hannah’s parents plan to tell her all about how she joined their family.
Renee encourages families who are considering embryo adoption, “Remember that you are giving these little lives a chance to come into this world. Even if one embryo is eventually born, it was worth it all for that little life. Hannah was the only child born from our adopted embryos, but she was worth every step we took. We will never know why the others didn't make it, but we wouldn't change a thing.”
Many couples have questions about the open adoption model used by Snowflakes Embryo Adoption Program. They wonder how much will be expected from them when it comes to communicating with another family about their children. How open does an open adoption have to be?
The open adoption model simply gives families the opportunity to stay in contact. How much or what method they use to do that is entirely up to the families themselves. For the Trabun and Smith families, an open adoption means staying in contact through email and sending presents for special occasions.
Stephanie Smith and her husband, Brian, say that the embryo donation program was an answer to their prayers about what to do with their remaining embryos. The open adoption model was an added blessing.
“This idea that we could know something about [the Trabuns] and that they would know something about us, that was extremely appealing,” Stephanie said. “These people truly are in a position of providing these embryos with something that we can’t.”
She said that it is comforting to stay in contact with the Trabuns and see the children growing up. “We touch base, which I’m very grateful for, and to know that [the children] are running around, laughing, playing, reading, and growing, I’m glad they’re open to sharing that with us.”
“I’ve really appreciated the communication we’ve had with the Smiths,” said Christy Trabun, mother of four, three of whom were born from the remaining embryos she and husband Mike adopted through Snowflakes. “I love seeing photos of their children and seeing some of the ways our kids look similar...I think they have a lot of similar personality traits.”
Staying in communication with the Smith family has been beneficial for health reasons, too. When the Smith’s children developed a food sensitivity, they alerted Christy who was able to watch for and diagnose the same sensitivity in their son, Cade. Without an open adoption arrangement, Christy would not have been able to diagnose the allergy so early.
The Trabuns talk openly to their children about where they each came from, including the embryo adoption process. Christy uses pictures and age-appropriate information to help them understand how they became a part of the family and plans on continuing the discussion in the future as they are able to understand more. She and Mike say that being in open communication with their children's’ biological family has helped prepare her for questions that they will likely have as they get older.
“[An open adoption model] has made us all the more sensitive to our children’s story of how they came to be a part of our family, and better prepares us for the day when they will have more questions about their genetic parents and siblings,” Mike said. “In a closed adoption model, you can easily forget that other lives and another family’s story are connected to our own.”
For now, the families have no plans to meet in person but will continue communication through email. In the future, though, they say they are open to whatever their children want.
“I don’t have any set idea of what may take place in the future,” said Stephanie. “We have to be respectful of their lives and privacy. But I feel comforted knowing that they love the children with all their heart.”
“As our children grow older, I think it will be good for our kids to be able to communicate in their own ways with the Smiths too if all parties are comfortable with that level of interaction,” Christy said. “We’re certainly open to however the future might pan out with regard to our connection to them and their children.”
Several years ago, we learned that it is medically impossible for us to conceive a child. Before seeing our fertility doctor, we had both separately learned about the Snowflakes Embryo Adoption program. After receiving our diagnosis, we quickly realized we were called to adopt embryos. But like many adoptions, our journey was filled with ups and downs.
After several matches failed transfers and miscarriages we had another transfer in February 2006 with our remaining embryos, and we had decided that this would be our last transfer if it was not successful. Instead, though, we were thrilled to learn that we were pregnant, and this time we were expecting twins!
But once again, joy was accompanied by heartache when we had an ultrasound at 16 weeks and learned that one of the twins had died at the end of our first trimester. Thankfully, we were blessed with Ethan Richard, who was born on October 19, 2006!
When Ethan turned a year old, we began thinking about how to expand our family. After our first experience, we had no idea what the path would look like. We were matched with a genetic family and adopted eight embryos. We had our transfer last October, and just prior to Ethan’s second birthday, we found out that we were pregnant!
We were blessed with Tyler Matthew on June 21, 2009.
I find significance in the fact that he was our gift on Father’s Day, as we had previously had so many difficult Mother’s and Father’s Days, as is true for so many infertile couples.
Embracing new ideas and concepts, or expanding one’s notions of them, is what my story is about. I am the first adopted frozen embryo in the world.
When my parents, John and Marlene Strege, struggled with infertility, they were devastated. They only wanted a baby. My mother was diagnosed with premature ovarian failure, which meant she was not longer producing eggs. Distraught, she asked her doctor if he had any frozen embryos they could adopt. “Well, yeah, I’ve got a lot of embryos,” he said, while explaining that he had never been asked that before. In that moment, the ways that one might adopt a child had expanded to include frozen embryos.
Meanwhile, thousands of miles away, my biological family also had struggled with infertility. Desperate to give their only daughter siblings, they turn to in-vitro fertilization, or IVF treatments, and created 28 embryos. After transferring four, they became pregnant with triplets. They had 24 remaining lives with whom to concern themselves, myself among them.
My parents were anxious to get opinions as to what God would think of adopting embryos. Would this be biblically pleasing to God? They consulted with the late Dr. Charles Manske, the founding President of Concordia University Irvine, Pastor Bob Dargatz, who was a professor Religion at Concordia at the time, and Dr. Sam Nafzger, Head of Commissions on Theology and Church Relations of the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod in St. Louis, MO. They all came to the same conclusion: God valued all life, that life began at conception, and providing frozen embryos a chance would be honorable to God. My parents also contacted Focus on the Family, seeking Dr. James Dobson’s opinion on adopting frozen embryos and whether God would approve. Dr. Dobson called my mom a week after her original contact. He said that he now knew what to tell her, and that first he himself had to get counsel. He said he would not speak for God; however, he felt that it was a moral obligation to adopt frozen embryos if the original family was not going to use them.
My mom and dad were about nine months into the adoption journey (this is nine months after the original contact with Dr. Dobson) and not closer to finding a family who wanted to place their remaining embryos for adoption. Due to HIPAA laws (confidentiality of medical records), doctors could not give them names of people who had remaining frozen embryos. Then Dr. Dobson invited my parents to Colorado, to Focus on the Family headquarters. He thought they might need a break from the emotional stress. He arranged for them to have lunch with the director of the crisis pregnancy division at Focus. Six weeks later, the head counselor came to the director’s office and said, “I just got a phone call from a woman who has 20 frozen embryos she wants to place for adoption.” The director replied, “I know who the adopting family is!” She referred the couple to Nightlight Christian Adoptions and its executive director, Ron Stoddart, a close family friend doubling as our adoption attorney.
God’s fingerprints were all over this. My parents adopted 20 frozen embryos and we were shipped via FedEx from Nebraska to my parent’s doctor’s office in California. We had been frozen and awaiting a home for more than two years and were blessed to finally start on our journey towards the fulfillment of life.
Embryos are stored in straws, two to three per straw in my case, in tanks of liquid nitrogen. The doctor thawed a straw at a time. I was the only embryo out of 20 to survive the thaw and successfully transfer to my mother’s womb and finally to birth. On December 31, 1998, the Streges became my parents.
Nightlight Christian Adoptions has since established the Snowflakes Embryo Adoption Program and more than 580 embryo adopted babies (a.k.a. Snowflakes babies) have been born through this program. It has expanded the horizons and the minds of many waiting parents on how they might grow their families. Adoption is often overlooked and forgotten. Human life is a miracle, sacred and precious to the King. Miracles are born out of divine intervention. We are the Lord’s handiwork, servants of His kingdom. It is our job to take the gifts God has given to us and grown in our knowledge of who He is by how He works in our lives.
God placed may parents on a journey of a lifetime that resulted in answered prayers. My life has been a blur of pro-life activism. I have expanded on my mother’s initial vision for a child. To dedicate my career and my life to finding homes for frozen embryos awaiting a chance at life around the world. My parents took a chance on me. Look to God and expand your knowledge of Him and His potential to work in your life.
I heard about embryo adoption for the first time, I don’t know how many years ago, on Focus on the Family radio broadcast. I wasn’t married at the time, but I had childhood cancer and had undergone radiation on my abdominal area. Some of my doctors said to not worry about it, but another doctor said it could be an issue. I remember when I was about nine years old, a woman from church came over to our house because she was concerned about my fertility. She had a similar experience with radiation and was infertile as a result. So while I knew it was a possibility that I would have problems getting pregnant, it wasn’t something I focused on.
After my husband and I got married we didn’t waste any time trying to conceive, as we were both in our 30s. But we knew right away we were going to have problems getting pregnant. We discovered our chances of getting pregnant were very low—only about a 1% chance. We were referred to some of the best doctors in the country, we were told that I could not get pregnant genetically, but they thought I could carry a baby. I started thinking about Snowflakes (The Snowflakes Embryo Adoption Program) again, but it took my husband a while to warm up to the idea. He was more open to the idea of finding an egg donor. For women, I think it’s sometimes a little easier to think about raising a child who isn’t genetically related.
Women are natural nurturers, and we just want a child to love…it makes it easier, I think, for us to consider raising a child that isn’t genetically ours. For men, I think the desire to reproduce and have children that are a part of them genetically is stronger. It took us several years to get on the same page. I kept praying about Snowflakes and felt peace about it. I felt like embryo adoption was such a great gift, not only for us but for the family who was donating the embryos, as we would give those embryos a chance at life. We went through further surgeries and we tried a few “experimental” things to see if we could get pregnant, but nothing worked. One spring we were driving in the middle of Texas, and my husband was fiddling with the radio…and there was someone from Nightlight on a local AM station talking about Snowflakes. Shortly thereafter, my husband told me that he felt this was a confirmation for us to choose embryo adoption. We both felt that these embryos were all lives, waiting for a chance and that they are each deserving of that chance.
I would say the process with Snowflakes moved very quickly in my mind. The hang-up was getting the home study done through a local agency that was going through a lot of transition at the time. They did our interviews in July and August but didn’t complete the home study until December. We were very patient and every time we’d check in our caseworker would say that she just needed a few hours to sit down and get it done. We had been very quick on our part to turn in the paperwork in the summertime and complete the education portion of the requirements, but the home study wasn’t completed until Christmas time that year.
We were been matched with two potential families that we said no to for different reasons before we were matched with a family in California with three little boys, and nine remaining embryos. We were matched and just a couple of months later, in June, our embryos were shipped to our doctor’s office in Dallas.
Shortly after that, we went into prep for the transfer. It took us three rounds before my uterus would respond the way they wanted it to. We had done a couple of mock cycles and it had behaved, but this time, when it came to the real deal, it had a mind of its own. Finally, on the third time, everything went as it was supposed to. The doctor thought that only four of our nine embryos were viable, but that we had a good chance of getting pregnant with the four that seemed the strongest. We decided to thaw the best two and weakest three, and only one survived the thaw. Our doctors said we could transfer the one or thaw the rest, but we felt at peace with just transferring the one that survived. And that’s what we did. Everything went beautifully, I got pregnant, and that was Elisabeth.
I had a difficult pregnancy. We discovered mid-term (at 18 weeks) that I had a short cervix, so they put a stitch in the cervix to hold it together (called a cerclage). Everything was fine for a few weeks, as I was on modified bedrest at home; but then my cervix shortened pretty severely at 24 weeks, so they had me go on bedrest in the hospital for 8 weeks. They had hoped that my pregnancy would go full term, but my water broke at 31 ½ weeks. Since I was preterm, they let me wait it out until my labor started. I lasted about 3 days and I went into labor, at exactly 32 weeks. It was a pretty hard and fast labor, but Elisabeth came out breathing on her own and crying. Though she was 3 pounds 2 ounces, she was only in the intensive neonatal care units for 4 weeks, just learning to feed and grow. When babies are born that early, they can’t eat very well and aren’t very coordinated, but Elisabeth never had any issues. She was 4 pounds 5 ounces when we brought her home, still four weeks away from her due date.
I don’t think of Elisabeth as not genetically related to us. Having given birth to her, I don’t even think about that. I don’t think about there being any separation or difference. We are in an open adoption with Elisabeth’s genetic parents, but I’ve spoken more with her genetic father than I have her genetic mother, as her genetic family is from Greece and, the mother especially, doesn’t speak good English. We plan to be very open with Elisabeth about her genetic family. They are very happy for us, very interested and excited. They are not overbearing at all, but they do stay in touch by email and phone every month or two. They also sent her a big package of things when she was first born – clothes, toys and some other sweet things. They also sent a gold cross for her when she gets a bit older. It’s been just perfect. As her genetic father said, “We all needed help, us with having children and them with being able to place their embryos with a family, so this was a way we could help you and you could help us. For us that was the perfect match.”
Mike and Michelle struggled with infertility issues for years when Michelle received the devastating news there were complications with her fallopian tubes, which would make having a genetic child extremely difficult.
Doctors advised them that their best chance of starting a family would be through in-vitro fertilization. As practicing Christians, Mike and Michelle felt the moral issues surrounding IVF made it an option they could not pursue. They were particularly concerned with what might happen to any embryos they would not use.
Instead, Michelle tried corrective surgery, which led to several failed pregnancies and eventually she required emergency surgery to remove her fallopian tubes. At that point, they knew the door had been closed forever on their ability to have a genetic child.
Even so, they did not lose hope.
Michelle was looking into different types of adoption when she came upon embryo adoption. She had never heard of the concept before and the idea intrigued her. She sent a text message to Mike saying, “What would you think if we gave birth to our adopted child?” To which Mike responded, “That’s the answer!” For the first time, they were able to visualize themselves with their own child.
After applying to the Snowflakes Embryo Adoption Program, Mike and Michelle quickly found themselves selected by a placing family. Initially, they thought to reject this first match because it happened so quickly. They determined they should first take some time to pray and really consider the placing parent family profile. They concluded this was the right match for the.
Michelle and Mike had their first FET using just one of the four embryos they adopted and were blessed with the birth of their long-awaited daughter Elora.
They kept the remaining three embryos in storage until the time was right to try for baby #2 – who was born in January!
Chip and Lynda were no strangers to the struggle of infertility. Unable to conceive naturally, the couple decided to pursue other means of family building. But they agreed if they were not able to have a child of their own, that they would consider adoption. The couple first pursued in-vitro fertilization treatments, but after three cycles and they still had not achieved a pregnancy.
Chip and Lynda began to seriously consider adoption. They explored all forms of adoption, including embryo adoption, though it did not seem as appealing as traditional adoption. Ultimately, however, after a great deal of research, they chose to pursue an adoption through the Snowflakes Embryo Adoption Program. Their reasons? Embryo adoption had a shorter matching time, they did not have to wait on a decision from a birth mother, and they had the ability to give birth to the baby. They also liked the fact that embryo adoption was more secure compared with a traditional domestic infant adoption. The parents who were placing their embryos for adoption had already completed their families and now wanted to give their remaining embryos a chance at life with the help of another family.
At first, the couple was leaning towards a semi-open adoption with minimal communication between themselves and the biological family. After they had completed the required training classes offered by Snowflakes, their perspective on openness changed significantly.
On a separate occasion Chip and Lynda attended an event with several birth mothers. The couple saw how heartbroken some of these mothers were about not knowing where their biological children were. Or some of them were left wondering why the communication between them and the adoptive parents suddenly ceased. At this point, Chip and Lynda decided to pursue a fully open adoption. They realized that both the biological parents and the adoptive child would be happier and healthier if they knew each other and had a door open for unrestricted communication.
Soon after, Chip and Lynda received an important phone call to tell them a placing family had selected them to receive the couple’s remaining embryos. They reviewed the placing parent’s family profile and felt very good about the match and accepted almost immediately.
Finally, after years of infertility struggles, Lynda became pregnant! The couple communicated constantly with the placing family about the pregnancy and results of the doctor appointments from the very beginning. Daughter Cally is their delight and joy. They remain close with her biological family. The two families Facetime regularly and have gone to visit each other in person several times. Chip and Lynda absolutely love knowing their daughter’s biological parents—they have become an essential part of their unique family.
When Joe and I decided it was again time to grow our family for the third time, I was nearly 40, and we decided that it might be good to “walk our talk” on being pro-life by adopting. While considering and praying about the usual adoption issues – domestic vs. international, infant vs. older child, etc., we “happened” to hear a Christian Medical Society audio cast on embryo adoption. We looked at each other and nearly simultaneously said, “We could do that!”
Ultimately, we were selected by two couples – 2 embryos from one and 4 from the other. We were sent detailed medical and family histories of each of the placing parents, in case there might be anything about which we were uncomfortable.
First cycle: of the first two embryos thawed, one died in the thawing process, and the one that survived was transferred. It failed to implant. Although I never actually had a positive pregnancy test, that experience felt very much like a miscarriage. Joe and I were starting to wonder what we’d set ourselves up for.
When I returned to the infertility specialist to begin the second attempt, he re-evaluated everything and said, “I don’t know what happened last time, but it wasn’t anything wrong with you.” Healing words. So we proceeded with the process.
We thawed 2 of the remaining 4 embryos and both survived and were transferred into my womb. Within a week, I began to feel pregnant. Not surprisingly, the test was positive this time. However, the six-week ultrasound showed only one baby. He looked healthy and in a good position, but this was bittersweet news because he was alone
When Jacob turned 18 months, we began planning for a final attempt at pregnancy with the 2 remaining embryos. We were both surprised and thrilled when that next pregnancy test was positive! Again, the six-week ultrasound was bittersweet: only one healthy baby. We welcomed Samuel home later that year.
Our boys are genetic brothers as well as adopted brothers. We have pictures of their genetic older brothers, taken at about 3 years of age. If you saw them all in the same room, you could pick them out as four brothers. Someday, I hope we can meet their genetic parents in person to thank them. We are blessed.
Meet two families who are building a story about life, sacrifice, and one very loved little girl.
Cecile and Michael DeMartini wanted to grow their family and assumed they would need the assistance of in vitro fertilization to conceive. When they naturally conceived their third child, though, they knew they would need to do something with their remaining embryos.
“It wasn’t an instant choice,” Cecile said. “It took us three years to make that choice. We wondered is it okay to give away your embryos because it isn’t convenient? What kind of family were we exposing them to?”
“What does it mean personally to me that I have a biological child somewhere else? How am I going to feel about it?” Michael asks. “I came to the realization that life is more precious than my personal feelings.”
So the couple agreed to donate their embryos through the Snowflake Embryo Adoption Program, where they were matched with the Reas.
The Reas had one child and were eager to have more. After several miscarriages, they tried a number of fertility treatment options but felt that embryo adoption was the right fit for their family: Joanna could carry the child, they could share the pregnancy with their older daughter, and bond as a family before the baby even arrived.
“We knew there were families who had embryos and were struggling with what to do with them. We felt like we could take some burden off of them and still grow our family,” says David.
Like many families who participate in the Snowflakes program, they were initially a little hesitant about an open adoption; as time went on, though, they became much more comfortable getting to know their donating family.
“Snowflakes had been our mediator through handwritten letters and emails,” Joanna said. “We felt more comfortable with that. It gave us some limits, some guards in the beginning.”
“Anyone with a young child knows that you need to acclimate your family. It’s hard enough, and a little distance was good at the time,” David said. “As Vivienne grows and becomes more aware, that’s when we’ll start to introduce the idea and the explanations [of where she came from] at whatever level she’s at. That’s when the contact becomes more open and direct...it’s ultimately about what our daughter is most comfortable with. It’s her story and we want to be sensitive to that.”
Cecile Demartini agrees. “I don’t want to confuse Vivienne. Life is confusing enough as it is. I’m following David and Joanna’s lead as far as they want to take it.”
The Reas are grateful to the DeMartini’s for their gift.
“They made an amazing, loving choice to donate those embryos. We had this miracle, Vivienne who has blessed our lives more than we could ever imagine,” Joanna said. “We’re so thankful for that opportunity. It’s a life-giving option and we’re on the receiving end of it.”
“It’s an incredible testament to the power of life,” David says. “If you go through this process, you are saying that this matters, this life matters, it’s not just a couple of cells you keep in cold storage or discard. It becomes a person. Ultimately, this is Vivienne’s story and part of who she is. She’s going to direct that story. She’s got a lot of people who love her for various reasons.”
“She’s lucky,” Joanna adds.
Vivienne and her older sister Natalia experienced the joy of meeting one another during a recent holiday visit. The sisters enjoyed playing games, braiding hair and hanging out together. They hope to do it again soon.
Shortly after marrying Bert and Kryna moved to Scotland where Bert pastored a Presbyterian church. Next, the couple moved to Canada to shepherd another congregation. Throughout their travels and mission work, they also tried to have a child without success. Then they received the terrible news they were unable to have children naturally. Their doctor also explained to them the chances of their success using IVF were very low.
Kryna and Bert realized their only option to start a family were through adoption. In Canada, however, the only feasible option to adopt was through the foster system. This option did not appeal to Kryna, as she found it would be hard to handle the emotional hurdles of caring for a child only to find out they were not available for adoption. At this time the couple discovered the Snowflakes Embryo Adoption Program.
They liked the concept of embryo adoption. However, the idea of open adoption was scary. They were concerned they would be in competition with the biological family for the child’s affection and that it would cause division between them and their adopted child.
Kryna and Bert’s decision ultimately came down to one pivotal question: What was going to be the best for the child?
The social worker who completed their home study for the Snowflakes program was an advocate for open adoption. She shared with them that children in closed adoptions always have a deep need to know more information about their biological family. If the child is unable to obtain this knowledge, most often times it can leave them with a great sense of loss later in life. She also assured them they would always be the child’s parents because they would be the ones to raise the child, no matter who shared their child’s biology. Kryna and Bert then understood that openness did not mean giving up our parenting, but actually meant gaining more family.
The family Bert and Kryna were matched with have become so much more than ‘just their placing family.' Annabelle and Tom have become their friends, their extended family. Kryna and Bert are blessed with three sons, Amos, Enoch, and Joseph–all who are genetic siblings! As the two families grow closer they encourage all of the children to consider one another as siblings and not just extended family. After all, they are! Bert and Kryna are grateful every day for the new family that they have established through open adoption and the children they are blessed with loving and parenting.
My wife Pauline and I started our family late in life. Pauline was already 38 when we had our first child, a daughter who was conceived naturally. We hoped for a second child, but after a few years passed with no luck, we sought fertility treatment. Unfortunately, Pauline’s fertility had declined significantly over those few years, and we were told that the probability of us having a second child of our own even with treatment was very low.
We were advised to try IVF with donor eggs, but we rejected that option because of our Catholic faith and our belief that life begins at conception. So, we just prayed and hoped for a miracle, since there was still some remote possibility that we might conceive naturally.
More time went by without any results, and eventually, we started to look into adoption. Our research led us to Nightlight and the Snowflakes program. We had never heard of embryo adoption, and we were fascinated with the idea that we could expand our family while at the same time bringing into the world a living being in need of a loving home.
After a few conversations with Snowflakes, we began the application process. By the time we completed the home study and all of the paperwork (which took some time), Pauline was already over 45, and we worried a little about this since we knew that many families donating embryos specify a preference for families where the mother is under 45. Snowflakes suggested that we might get matched more quickly if we would be open to donor families with a single embryo.
We agreed to this, and within a few months, we had completed all the arrangements to simultaneously adopt two embryos from two different families. Unfortunately, one of the embryos did not survive the thawing process, but the other did, and nine months later Pauline gave birth Carolina, a beautiful and healthy baby girl, who is now almost three months old.
We had been told that the odds of success with one embryo to transfer were relatively low, and we worried about that too, but it worked for us!! We feel incredibly blessed and grateful to Snowflakes for helping to make this miracle happen.
Although Blaine and Kathryn had their three biological children and wanted more kids. They felt they should expand their family through adoption. And they did— child #4 was adopted into their family. They believed the door for adopting was still open. While researching different adoption agencies, they learned about embryo adoption.
What on earth was that?
To them it was a foreign concept; at the time, they did not even know what in-vitro fertilization was, let alone embryo adoption. So they did an extensive amount of research on their own trying to understand if embryo adoption was something they would be comfortable with pursuing. After hours of research, and with even more hours in prayer, they concluded that embryo adoption was the direction that they wanted to go.
Blaine and Kathryn chose the Snowflakes Embryo Adoption Program. The couple was very open with the types of embryos that they were willing to receive: they were interested in giving the embryos that were having a harder time being matched with adopting families a chance at life.
Blaine and Kathryn were matched and later went in to have their frozen embryo transfer (FET). Only one of the three embryos they adopted survived the thawing process. They excitedly transferred this embryo into Kathryn’s ready-womb. They did get pregnant, but sadly the pregnancy ended in a miscarriage.
After some time, Blaine and Kathryn decided they wanted to be re-matched through Snowflakes. This time around was unique as they were matched with two families who each had only one embryo to donate.
On FET day both embryos survived the thaw but inexplicably their cell division did not seem to be proceeding as expected. Blaine and Kathryn were committed to the life of these two embryos and went ahead with the transfer.
Miraculously in their opinion, Kathryn did become pregnant! At their 6-week ultrasound, a single heartbeat was detected. Though they had hoped for two babies, they were thrilled to see and hear one of the embryos survived and was now growing into a healthy baby.
They welcomed their baby girl Everly home and she has brought even more joy and happiness into their house. “She has been such a blessing to our family and is loved so much. We couldn't imagine life without her!”
August 5: Yesterday we had our embryo transfer appointment. Unfortunately, we had to thaw all ten of the embryos we adopted. This resulted in three embryos that we transferred.
August 19: Today we found out we are PREGNANT! This is still a critical time and we will know more at our first ultrasound. We hope to then find out how many of our three babies are developing and if there is a heartbeat(s).
August 27: We had our first ultrasound today and found out we have ONE baby! Everything was so tiny, but we were very fortunate to see a little flutter that the doctor said was the heartbeat.
September 13: We went in today for our eight-week ultrasound and everything looks normal.
November 22: Tracy is approximately 18 weeks along at this point. We go in for our next sonogram where we hope to answer the boy/girl question. Tracy has had some minor pregnancy symptoms but nothing too difficult so far (easy for me to say).
December 6: We had our 20-week ultrasound today and found out we are having a baby BOY! He appeared to be perfectly normal and healthy. We even got to see his fingers and toes. We are so in love with our little boy and are amazed at God’s miracle.
February 25: Tomorrow I will be 32 weeks along in my pregnancy. Only 8 weeks to go! At the last doctor visit, I was measuring a little small so the doctor ordered another ultrasound. Our little one was fine and was actually measuring 3 days ahead of schedule.
April 25: Forgive us our overwhelming joy in announcing the arrival of Jack Lewis Jones III, a.k.a. Trey. He arrived last night at 8:31 pm. He weighs 8 lbs 3 oz and measures 20 3/4 inches long. Tracy had a c-section and both Trey and Mom are doing really well. Words cannot express our overwhelming joy. Thank you to so many of you that have prayed for Trey and his arrival.
We knew when we married in 1995 that we wanted to have a family, but we also knew that it would be difficult to conceive our own child due to my paralysis from a bicycle accident. About three years into our marriage we began the traditional domestic adoption process.
The following year we heard about Nightlight Christian Adoptions and Snowflakes on a radio broadcast. It took us about a year to get comfortable with the concept of adopting someone else’s frozen embryo. Kate was very excited, as she really wanted to experience pregnancy and childbirth.
Initially, we were matched with a couple who had six embryos, but none of the embryos survived the thawing process. We knew that because of our ages (by this time we were in our forties) we needed to act soon to seek another match. Snowflakes matched us again at no charge and 4 months later a couple with 5 embryos chose us.
What a glorious day it was when two weeks after our transfer date we found out that Kate was pregnant! Kate connected deeply with the baby growing inside her, and our daughter Zara was born. I was amazed that a scrawny three-pound baby girl could immediately and completely capture my heart the very moment I first saw her.
Zara is now a healthy, happy, smart, energetic bundle of joy who loves life and greets every day as the gift that it really is. We are so blessed and proud to have her as our daughter.
Ben and Stephanie had always wanted several children and they eagerly looked forward to being parents someday. However, after a few years of not getting pregnant, they discovered an infertility diagnosis that doctors said would mean they could never have biological children. Stephanie remembered, “This was like getting a bomb dropped on us! We wondered what this meant for our hopes and dreams.”
Before they knew anything of their infertility struggle, a coworker had told Stephanie about her friend having "Snowflake babies” and explained what that meant. Stephanie had thought at the time it was neat, but it wasn’t until her OB-GYN suggested Snowflakes Embryo Adoption as an option in the wake of their infertility discovery that she remembered. In the following weeks and months, as the couple explored embryo adoption, they knew in their hearts that this was the answer to their prayers.
As a part of their Snowflakes application, the couple had to indicate what ethnicities they were open to adopting. For a long time, the couple had felt a love growing within them for the Japanese people; a love that seemed random at the time but had just kept growing stronger. It seemed like it would be improbable, but the couple both strongly felt that they should put down Japanese. After submitting their application, they discovered that there were Japanese embryos waiting for a match. “We didn't totally fit the placing family's criteria, but we shared our story with the Snowflakes team and that we would love to adopt these embryos. They said they would forward our information on to the family to consider.”
Shortly afterward the couple family received a pretty ecstatic email back from the matching coordinator. Stephanie recalls, "She said 'You're not gonna believe this -- this family has been looking for three years for a family they wanted to place embryos with and they think you're the one.’”
Transfer day came and all three of their embryos survived the thaw. At their doctor’s advice, all three embryos were transferred. Only one embryo implanted. The couple was saddened at the loss of the two embryos but thrilled to be pregnant.
Stephanie's pregnancy went well, and beautiful, delightful Annika was born.
After giving birth, the Hawkins told their agency they wanted to have direct contact with the placing family, a move that placing parent Gina calls an “unexpected blessing.” The two couples communicate regularly, exchanging e-mails and photos. And when Annika was 2 years old, the placing family came to meet her in person. Gina says it felt right knowing that Annika is where she’s supposed to be—with her parents.
Annika is now a bubbly, outgoing and fearless 7 year old who fills her parents’ lives with joy.
"We can't imagine not having done embryo adoption and not having her," Stephanie says. “There's nothing like getting to carry your own adopted child and give birth! The risks involved are worth it.”
We’ve known about Nightlight for many years and have known many families who have used them for their agency. What we were about to find out was that Nightlight was more than an agency… it was a family of believers who would pray for you, cheer for you and rejoice when God answered your prayers. In March of this year, we received an email about special case embryos from Nightlight. I was surprised to hear of genetic families who were open to older moms (I am currently 40) and many children being in a family already. The idea of special case embryos (at risk for a possible genetic issue) thrilled my heart in a way that can only be explained as God moving.
When I asked my husband about this, we agreed that we are pro-life which means defending life from its very beginning. Surprisingly, he agreed to have me call and ask questions. From that first conversation with Nightlight, I instantly felt at peace with their friendliness and resourcefulness. A few days later we received an email from Nightlight telling us a genetic family with special case Korean-American embryos had come forward. We couldn’t believe God demonstrated his loving care for us and our heart by giving us a potential match that would fit beautifully with our family.
We continued to see His miraculous hand through the adoption process. Just as we began to fear a bit about finances, God did an amazing thing by blessing us with a scholarship from Nightlight as His way of saying “keep going…I’m with you.” Through obstacles with paperwork in our state and medical scares, each time I emailed Nightlight I was assured they were praying for us, would support us and that God was with us. I have worked with three different adoption agencies for our previous adoptions and never have I felt such love and support as we did with Nightlight.
God has given us a new platform to speak and share His story in our lives and His heart for all children… even “our babies in the freezer” (as my 7 yr old likes to say with big eyes as she prays for them!).
We have had many opportunities to speak to our church and family to explain how the love of Jesus compels us as we move forward in this unique adoption. We have had the joy of choosing contact with the genetic mom of our snowflake babies and sharing with her about our process. We have been able to share our motivation and faith with our clinic and its staff and some have remarked that this story is amazing. We look forward to what God will do as I begin medicines this week and our baby transfer is set for September. We praise Him for giving us the courage to walk each step of this road and praise Him that He is with us. If God can be with a family of limited means and small faith like ours, then He can do great things in your family too when He’s the One who is calling you, He will be the faithful One who equips you to do it.
David and I were devastated after five hard years of infertility treatment to learn we could not have children. We had dreamed for years of the family that we would have together and had spent thousands of dollars and all our energy trying to realize this wish.
One day we came upon the Snowflakes Embryo Adoption Program and were overjoyed. After accepting I’d never be pregnant, I learned I could be pregnant, wear maternity clothes, give birth, and breastfeed my adoptive child. We were able to correspond with the biological family, share photos, stories, and medical histories, and have a connection for our baby to know his biological family someday.
We felt so much love for the family staring at us in the photos, and their twins were the most beautiful children I had ever seen. I knew we were led to this family.
After an amazing nine-month pregnancy, our little snowflake baby, Frank, was born in the middle of the night, in the middle of a snowstorm in a very crowded waiting room. He is such a joy! Frank was such a beautiful, calm, and social baby. He loved getting passed around and meeting new faces. As a toddler, his social disposition brought so much joy into this world. I see him leaning out of the grocery cart trying to play peek-a-boo with the stranger next to him. I see the stresses of the day melt from them as they smile and playback.
He is such a force in this world. I’m so excited to see how God will use him as a future husband and father. We participated in the White House press conference supporting the veto of the bill that would have removed restrictions on the use of federal funds in research that requires the killing of frozen embryos. We are blessed to have our son Frank, born as the result of the wonderful gift of frozen embryos to us!
Dan and Kelli met on a Christian dating website in their early 40s. A year after marrying, the couple decided they should build their family. After eighteen months with no pregnancies, Kelli decided to visit a fertility doctor. Their dream seemed to be ebbing away after undergoing six months of blood tests and scans and getting no concrete answers. Finally, their worst fear was confirmed: Kelli’s eggs were determined to be no longer viable. She would not be able to conceive a genetic child.
Kelli and Dan were heartbroken and grieved tremendously over the news. When visiting her family doctor for a routine checkup, Kelli recounted her test results through tears. The doctor suggested she and Dan look into embryo adoption, explaining the process of being able to experience pregnancy with the adoptive child. Intrigued, Kelli told Dan about the concept and together they spent hours researching online. The more they researched, the more they saw this was the solution they had been looking for.
Kelli immediately began contacting embryo adoption programs. Unfortunately, because she was 45, many of the programs said they were not able to help her as she was past the age requirement. Determined, Kelli continued to seek more information. Finally, they contacted Snowflakes Embryo Adoption and was told she was not too old for the program. She immediately broke down in tears of joy.
Dan and Kelli applied with the Snowflakes program and were matched with a placing family: Chris and Rebecca. After reviewing their family profile, Dan and Kelli knew immediately this family was perfect for them. They had many similarities and had gone through infertility struggles as well. Wanting an open adoption for their children, the two couples decided to meet face to face. Over dinner, they discovered they had more in common than they initially realized. It was clear the two families were meant to be matched with one another. “It was like a joining of hearts,” remembers Kelli.
Once the adoption was complete, Dan and Kelli scheduled their first transfer date as soon as possible. They transferred 2 embryos and two weeks later they learned Kelli was pregnant! She gave birth to their adoptive son in December. 15 months later, the couple welcomed a daughter from the same adoptive embryos.
Kelli and Dan made a “life book” to help their children understand their unique story from an early age, which includes their other biological sisters and parents. Both families have visited each other’s homes, and in between visits they keep in contact over phone calls, email, Facebook, and Skype. Dan and Kelli (and Chris and Rebecca) believe this relationship is beneficial for all children involved. They want all the siblings to know each other and not be afraid to ask questions.
“My sister-in-law often jokes with us that we are the ‘21st-century couple’ since we met online and then had our kids through embryo adoption,” says Kelli. “While it has been unconventional for sure, there is no doubt that God has ‘made our steps firm’ and orchestrated the forming of our family.”
For so very long, Keith and I tried to get pregnant. It became painfully evident it wasn't going to work. We looked into the in-vitro process but were discouraged by the uncertainty coupled with the enormous expense.
Researching on the internet, we discovered the potential of the Snowflakes Embryo Adoption Program. We learned of the great success this option was providing couples like us. Our hopes were renewed. We applied with Snowflakes and they helped match us with a family with remaining embryos - a perfect, most wonderful family.
The process was thorough, and in fairly short order, our hopes came true. We were pregnant and gave birth to our precious Samantha. We are so thankful for the embryo adoption option--it was truly the perfect solution for our family.
After getting married, Jamie and Dan wanted to start a family straight away. After a year with no results, the couple went to see a fertility specialist. Finding no reason why the couple should not be able to conceive, their doctor suggested the couple try artificial insemination. After ten attempts at AI and a life-threatening pregnancy scare, the couple opted to try IVF instead. This failed as well.
Despite doctors telling them, they were healthy, the couple felt extremely discouraged that they were still not pregnant. “You're kind of numb because it's like, 'Wow, this really isn't going to happen?'" Jamie remembers.
Jamie and Dan knew they were done with IVF. They could not bear to endure one more fertility treatment. They started to seriously consider the route of adoption. During a night of researching different adoption agencies, Jamie stumbled across the Snowflakes Embryo Adoption website.
The idea of embryo adoption immediately intrigued her. She liked the fact she could experience pregnancy and give birth to her adopted child. She explained the concept to Dan and he loved the process as well.
"I liked the idea of saving these embryos because the embryo is the combination, and we believe that's life, so all these lives are frozen that need some parents and we need some kids," Dan says. "Let's give them a chance."
Jamie and Dan applied through the Snowflakes program and were matched with a placing family that had six frozen embryos. Those embryos were shipped to a nearby fertility clinic and two were transferred in Jamie. Nine months later, Jamie and Dan were finally parents to a beautiful baby girl. 16 months later, the couple welcomed their twin boys, born from the same set of embryos as their sister. They knew their family was now complete.
Jamie and Dan are also in contact with their children’s biological parents. They keep in contact regularly through email and they travel to meet them every summer. The relationship has been valuable during Jamie’s pregnancies and when it comes to medical questions about their children. The couple also loves that they are able to answer any question their children might have about their biological family.
Dan and Jamie are using an age-appropriate method to explain to their children the unique way they came into their family. They have a book with seeds and different pictures of their family. They use the book to explain how the placing family donated their “seeds” and helped them have children of their own.
Dan and Jamie’s daughter not only understood the concept but refers to the placing parents’ daughter, her biological sibling, as her sister. She even has a picture of her sister taped above her bed. "That told us that she got it and that it was special that it was her sister," Dan recalls. They plan to tell the boys using the same method when they are old enough to understand.
"I feel like a traditional mom because I am, I'm their mother, and even though we have this unique situation, it's kind of nice to have like a second family," Jamie says. “Being a mom is being a mom, no matter what kind of kids you have. There are so many families that come about from nontraditional ways from different kinds of adoption, and this is just another unique way."
Why wasn’t one child enough for me?
Our son Thomas was healthy, smart, and full of fun. The process to adopt him and bring him to our home in North Carolina had been grueling. Now Vietnam was closed for adoptions.
Why wasn’t one child enough? And why, after Thomas joined our family did I still dream at night of being pregnant?
The reason, I know now, is that God had a plan for us.
For many months I had prayed to God to help me let go of the desire to add another child to the family. But international adoption didn’t seem like it would work for us again. And before we adopted Thomas we learned that the only way I would become pregnant was through IVF because we are both carriers for Cystic Fibrosis. With a 1 in 4 chance that any children we might have would have CF, that wasn’t a good option for us. Sperm and egg donors didn’t interest us either.
Then one day, I picked up a parenting magazine passed along to us by a neighbor. As I flipped through it, I found an article about embryo adoption. I had never heard of embryo adoption.
My skin felt like it was charged with electricity. Was this a way to add to our family?
I told myself that embryo adoption was only an option if I could find a Vietnamese embryo donor. What were the chances of that in the U.S.?
Not knowing what else to do, I typed “embryo adoption” and “Vietnamese” into the Google search engine.
And there they were, on a Snowflakes listing for multiethnic embryos. I waited a day and then called Nightlight Christian Adoptions.
I explained to the placement coordinator, “Look, you’ll think I’m crazy but I am a Caucasian woman and I am interested in the Vietnamese embryos. I have no idea if I can become pregnant and I’m already 40 years old.”
Surprisingly, she didn’t think I was crazy. She said some placing families had been waiting for several years for someone to adopt the embryos and they were beginning to lose hope.
Now I needed to tell my husband what I had done.
He prayed about it for a while and decided he was willing to try embryo adoption. Luckily, we were chosen by a placing family who decided we were perfect for their embryos. After the familiar home study process, physicals, and paperwork, the embryos were sent to our fertility clinic in North Carolina. The doctor implanted a single embryo one morning in March.
We didn’t tell anyone. But somehow Thomas knew. That afternoon, in front of my husband and me, Thomas pointed to my belly and said: “I want you to have a baby in there.”
Again, my skin tingled all over. And two weeks later, our clinic called to tell me that I was pregnant and all tests looked great.
My pregnancy was easy and uneventful. At 42, I gave birth to John. He is incredibly sweet-natured and handsome. People notice that he doesn’t look like me, usually assume he’s adopted, and frequently ask, “How long has he been with you?”
“Since he was an embryo,” I answer, giving me an opportunity to share this miracle in our lives.
A life without children seemed a curse without a cure. My whole life I had dreamed of motherhood only to have those dreams crushed with the words “You and your husband are not likely to conceive children together.” For seven long years, we waited for our empty arms to be filled.
I read an article from Focus on the Family about embryo adoption. We quickly decided to pursue this exciting adoption option and finished our home study and submitted all our paperwork. In what seemed like no time at all, we received the much-anticipated phone call! A genetic family in the northwestern United States had chosen us to adopt their embryos. They mailed us a letter about themselves and pictures of their family.
Transfer day arrived. Two weeks later we received the news we had waited so long to hear. I was pregnant!
Nine months later, we sat staring at the most beautiful little boy we had ever laid eyes on. Our hearts are filled with gratitude for the family that chose life for our son and allowed us the privilege of becoming parents. When we look at our son, we see the fingerprints of God. Infertility was a devastating storm in our life, but the seasons of plenty that came from the rain resulted in a gift of hope—our son, snowflake baby #8, Tanner James.
After James and Kristy were married they felt no sense of urgency to start a family. At the time, James was busy working as teacher and Kristy was just finishing up cosmetology school. But after six years, they started to wonder why they were not getting pregnant. After some discussion, the couple decided to visit their doctors. Kristy’s test results came back stating she was healthy and she should have no trouble conceiving a child. However, James’ test results showed he had a zero sperm count; he would never be able to father a genetic child.
The couple was shocked at first. This news was a death of a dream; a death of an expectation. When you get married, you’re expected to have children. Most people don’t ever consider they will have fertility issues. After the shock had worn off, they started looking into other ways to build their family, for they believed God had a plan.
James and Kristy first heard about Snowflakes Embryo Adoption through an article in a magazine. The article explained how Snowflakes allowed families to adopt frozen embryos from other families that had undergone IVF. The mother is then able to carry and give birth to their adopted child. At the time, the couple did not think much of it (as they were not looking into adoption at that point). Six months after receiving the infertility diagnosis, one of Kristy’s clients opened up about her own struggle with infertility. After Kristy explained she was facing the same issue, the client proceeds to tell Kristy about her friend who adopted a baby through the Snowflakes Embryo Adoption—the same program they read about in the magazine.
They came to the conclusion this was the way they were supposed to build their family. Their decision was solidified after the death of James’ grandfather, who left the couple an inheritance which was enough to cover the costs of the adoption. After going through a home study and through a matching process, James and Kristy adopted eight frozen embryos.
The fertility clinic advised they thaw all eight, due to the fact that not all embryos survive the thawing process. Out of eight, only three survived the thaw. All three were transferred and an ultrasound weeks later revealed Kristy was pregnant with twins! Kylie and Luke (who are Snowflake babies #84 and #85) were born.
James and Kristy are open with their children about the adoption. Kristy wrote a journal them, explaining how they joined their family. And the twins love it! (Luke especially loves the fact that he was delivered to the clinic via FedEx truck!) The couple strongly believes it was God’s plan for the twins to be a part of their family. And for that, they say they are truly blessed.
When Josh and Kjersten got married they knew that they wanted a big family, so they started trying to get pregnant straight away. Kjersten started to feel sick with unexplained, severe hot flashes. Her doctor discovered she had primary ovarian insufficiency and she would have a < 5% chance of getting pregnant naturally. Surprise! Six months after learning about the condition, Kjersten did become pregnant! Sadly, she miscarried at nine weeks, which was devastating for both her and Josh. They knew that was probably their 5% chance of conceiving and that it would not happen again.
Josh and Kjersten started to look seriously into adoption. If they were going to adopt, they knew they wanted to pursue a program that had a big need for adopting parents. This led the couple to the Snowflakes Embryo Adoption Program. As Kjersten remembers it, “When we found out we wouldn’t be able to have children of our own, we learned about embryo adoption. There are so many embryos waiting in frozen storage for someone to give birth to them.”
Josh and Kjersten spent the next couple of years saving money for their adoption. They were amazed that after completing all of their application paperwork and home study they were matched with a placing family within a week! The placing family that had chosen them had sixteen 2 and 3 day (day frozen) embryos.
They scheduled their first frozen embryo transfer. Three of the embryos were thawed and 2 survived. Their doctor assured them by explaining how healthy the surviving embryos looked. Two weeks after the FET they found out Kjersten was pregnant, but at eleven weeks she had another miscarriage. The couple was absolutely crushed over a loss of a second child.
But Josh and Kjersten had 13 more embryos they had accepted responsibility for and they scheduled a second FET. This time 4 embryos were thawed and again 2 survived. After the transfer, two weeks later the pregnancy test came back positive! Kjersten was able to carry until 32 weeks but had to be induced early due to preeclampsia complications. Even though Eleanor was born early, she was extremely healthy and active. She is happy, curious, and loved. Josh and Kjersten cannot wait to bring her nine brothers and sisters out of frozen storage and welcome them into their family one day.
It was a dark snowy Friday night when I was driving to meet my husband at a local fundraiser. I typically drive in silence but I had stumbled across a radio program that caught my attention. My husband and I been unsuccessfully trying to build our family for over three years. The initial testing had left us without answers. We were preparing to meet with a RE and were nervous about the ‘next steps’. At the time we did not know embryo adoption existed. Should our next step be IVF? Could we do IVF and still honor our faith and honor life? These discussions were weighing heavily on my heart. As I listened, the message focused on the sanctity of human life, even in its earliest stages, and my tears welled up. A part of me was scared this was my answer: IVF was not the right choice for us. As I arrived at our destination, I saw my hubby, rolled down my window, and said I would meet him inside. As he walked away, the message concluded and right there in front of me, fireworks started going off. I couldn’t have planned the timing better, but there they were…. Fireworks.
A few weeks later our RE advised us that they would do a workup on me and then likely would recommend IVF if all came back normal. We shared our beliefs with them about not creating more embryos than we would use. They hesitantly agreed to honor our wishes, warning us our chances of conceiving would be significantly reduced with these restrictions. We left feeling a little defeated and more confused than ever.
We returned to our RE’s office ready to discuss the recent test results and next steps. We were floored when our doctor said ‘premature ovarian failure’ and said our chances of conceiving even with IVF and without any of our ‘restrictions’ were less than 5%. I was shocked! I was angry. I was confused. I was every emotion under the sun. I was devastated. But now we knew for sure: the door to IVF was shut.
Somewhere in the fog of the next few months, I learned of embryo adoption and that night of fireworks started to have new meaning and new hope. I had been heartbroken over the possibility of not being able to feel life grow inside me. I wanted to experience the joy of childbirth. Embryo adoption truly was and is the answer to our prayers. We began our embryo adoption.
A year later, we had been through one failed FET and had been matched with a second family. We were head over heels in love with this family. They had chosen life for their three embryos and had agreed to place them with us. We felt such a strong connection to the family and were overjoyed with the match.
When our embryologist received the embryology report, she called to tell us we should consider sending the embryos back. We quickly said no, we were committed to our babies. She went on to tell us the embryos were graded a B, BC, and C and there had been a power outage when they were being frozen. The power blipped for just a second and then the generator kicked in, but with the fragility of embryos, she feared we wouldn’t even have viable embryos once they were thawed. We were crushed but held onto hope that this was the plan for our family and we needed to stay the course.
Two months later we were pleasantly surprised to show up for our transfer with two viable embryos ready to transfer and one left safely in cryopreservation for a future attempt. On September 15th we heard the words we had waited so long to hear: “You’re pregnant!” On June 2 we gave birth to our beautiful baby girl, Makenna Lee.
And let’s not forget about that little ‘C’ embryo that was waiting in the freezer for us. Against all odds, he survived the thaw beautifully and we completed our family with the birth of the sweetest boy ever, Alexander Brooks. While embryo adoption may not be the right choice for everyone, it blessed us beyond expectation and measure.
Ardent musicians Terri and Jason started to date in their mid-twenties. From the very beginning, they understood that infertility might be an issue for them. Terri had known since she was 16 years old she had Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome (PCOS). The couple agreed that when the time came they would be open to the possibility of adoption.
They married and decided to hold off on starting a family and focus on their music. That all changed in when Jason had a heart attack. Thankfully he recovered from the trauma without any complications, but it completely changed his and Terri’s attitudes on life. They now focused more time and energy on starting a family.
Since they suspected they might have trouble conceiving, they did not waste any time when they didn’t get pregnant quickly. Both went to be tested by their doctors. Terri was surprised to learn that she was in great reproductive health should have no issues with pregnancy. Unfortunately, Jason was informed that he had azoospermia and would not be able to conceive children.
The couple felt a horrific sense of loss from realizing that they would never be able to conceive on their own.
They learned about Snowflakes Embryo Adoption from their fertility doctor and decided to do more research. Both Terri and Jason liked the fact that they were able to know the biological family of their adopted embryos and decided to go ahead with the program. They applied and were matched with a family that had seven 2Pn embryos. The doctor at their fertility clinic explained that he had success with these embryos and there was no reason that the transfer should not result in a pregnancy.
Under the guidance of their doctor, all seven of Jason and Terri’s embryos were thawed. The plan was to transfer two and refreeze the remainder. However, two of the embryos died during the thaw and two more died during incubation. Of the three embryos that were left, only one was considered strong enough to result in pregnancy. The couple decided to go ahead and transfer two embryos (one being the strong one) and let one embryo grow out for another day to see if it could be refrozen. The next day, they heard from the doctor that the last embryo had died.
After the transfer, Terri and Jason waited on pins and needles until they were able to take a pregnancy test. They did not have any more embryos and knew that they would have to wait even longer to try again. Two weeks post-transfer they took a pregnancy test, it came back positive!
Terri had zero complications during pregnancy and gave birth to a healthy baby girl. In fact, out of the seven adopted embryos, their little “survivor” was the lowest graded embryo on the original embryology report. According to Terri, “Our amazing daughter is living proof that even the lowest graded embryos are beautiful and special and have so much potential. We are so blessed!”
Robert and Sarah’s infertility story, unfortunately, started very early in their marriage. After getting married in the couple started dreaming about the next step: having kids. They imagined they would begin their family right away, but unfortunately, about a year into their marriage, they were diagnosed infertile. “While some people have struggles with infertility, we were purely infertile,” Sarah said. “It was a shock and we had to first absorb the fact that we couldn’t have kids from our own genetics. It’s a grief factor of its own.”
Realizing that children wouldn’t come the conventional way, the couple turned to adoption and were exploring their options when a friend of a friend heard a radio announcement about Snowflakes Embryo Adoption. “She told my friend and my friend told me,” Sarah recalls. “Crazy enough, she was in Minnesota and we’re in Florida so it was quite a distance the news had to travel.”
But from the moment Robert and Sarah first heard about Snowflakes they knew it was exactly what they were looking for. Sarah was healthy enough and their doctor confirmed she would likely able to carry a child. To Sarah, that was the best part – possibly being able to carry a pregnancy. Also, Sarah was excited at the prospect of beginning to nurture the child both physically and emotionally in utero.
In 2005 the couple applied to adopt through the Snowflakes Program, completed a home study, set their criteria for a match and submitted their family profile. All with the hopes that they would find just the right match for them.
The couple’s first few attempts to achieve pregnancy, sadly, were not successful. But when Vance was born they were overjoyed. “He was worth the wait! A wait that at times felt foreboding and almost unbearable but nevertheless worth it,” says Sarah.
When they were considering adding to their family again, but with no remaining embryos from their previous adoption, they considered a traditional adoption and being matched with a birth mom. But, the possibility of being able to carry a pregnancy again helped them decide once more embryo adoption was right for them. They turned to Snowflakes once again and were matched with another placing family.
Hannah was born as a result of that placement. Now they have decided their family is complete. They are forever grateful for the opportunity to bring life into this world in such a unique way through Snowflakes.
There is life after embryo adoption too, such as Vance, at age 7, understanding his adoption story as best he can at his age. The family has chosen to communicate with their placing families through the Snowflakes team. Sarah says, “I still love sharing pics of the kids with Snowflakes to be passed along and observe things, especially in my daughter, that makes me think I'd really like her placing parents.”
Have you ever considered that Jesus was adopted by his earthly father Joseph? We don’t know much about Joseph from Scripture, but we do know he was a man able to hear the voice of God and obey it. He took Mary as his wife when societal norms would have dictated another action; he took refuge in Egypt under guidance from God to keep Jesus safe from the anger of King Herod who was seeking to kill Him.
Not only was Jesus adopted by Joseph, Jesus as an embryo was miraculously placed and implanted in Mary’s womb. As a Christian adoption agency, these are facts from the Scripture we hold true. God is the Creator and Sustainer of all life. This is why we are passionate about our Snowflakes Embryo Adoption Program.
We want to help our families with remaining embryos choose a family to give birth to those embryos. No longer subjected to life in suspended animation, these embryos will now have a chance to be born, to grow and become a living, breathing person with purpose.
Thank you for considering embryo donation or embryo adoption. Both are life-giving. Both are an answer to someone’s prayer. Both are honoring to our Creator God.
The first time we saw our oldest son smile after tickling him, it melted our hearts.
Our oldest son. There are times we’d never thought we’d say that. Our son. After years of trying to have children – going through rounds of natural attempts, then rounds of IUI and IVF, and finally having a doctor say that it was just not possible – we heard what God had been telling us all along.
The truth is God had been speaking to us for some time about adoption. We’d always known we wanted to adopt at some point in our family. We’d talked about it and laid out a path for us – have a child or two of our own, then go through a traditional adoption to add to our existing family. Although the desire to adopt had been on us, God did as He often does; showing who is truly in control when our plans are confounded and His plans are revealed.
Matt’s parents had been volunteers at Focus on the Family in Colorado Springs, and through Focus, we’d learned of embryo adoption and Nightlight Christian Adoptions and the hundreds of thousands of homeless snowflake babies waiting in frozen orphanages. We again felt the call of God on our lives, so we jumped into the process.
That process was challenged by our military duty location at the time, assigned to the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv, Israel. How were we going to find a certified social worker in Israel to do a home study? How would we track down a way to complete our background checks? And if they wouldn’t ship embryos overseas, how could we even do the transfer? One by one, God opened these doors, resolving each problem and making it more clear that this is what He’d intended for us.
As we returned to the US, we found ourselves stationed at Ft. Bragg, NC, one of only a handful of bases with a military doctor who specialized in infertility and could administer the medicine protocol and perform the transfer. Out of dozens of possible locations to be stationed, God put us in the one spot that had the right doctor at the right time.
And that’s when the right family came along and selected us to adopt their little ones, a family with 20 frozen embryos and two successful births of their own. Nightlight Christian Adoptions brought us together, the embryos were shipped, and the military doctor performed the transfer at the tail end of Matt’s deployment to Baghdad in Iraq. Returning home, he joined me a few days later at the doctor’s office only to learn I was pregnant. The homecoming was complete in every way. God had taken us so far on this journey through the wilderness of infertility. He had taken our desires and bent them to His own.
On May 13th, 2012 (a most special Mother’s Day present), our twins were born – Jackson and Cade – crying and beautiful and alive. As alive that day as they had been eight years earlier when they were conceived. Now adopted, they were a part of our family, and we were humbled and honored to care for and raise them. We brought them home, knowing that God had the very best in store for us and for them.
Our family used Nightlight Christian Services in adopting our "snowflake" daughter, Makenna. We have a semi-open relationship with her genetic family and periodically, I send them photo books with updates on Makenna. Embryo adoption has been such a gift to us and I am so thankful to our genetic family for sharing the ultimate gift of life with us through their three remaining embryos. I wrote this poem & included it in one of the first photo books we sent them. I hope as Makenna grows up she will read it and know what a perfect plan God had for her all along.
"God created me, a tiny little seed
You gave me the gift of life and recognized my need
The need to find that family that was praying for me so,
You shared me with them and they helped me to grow
from a tiny little snowflake, no one would have guessed
into beautiful baby Makenna, the gift of happiness!"
(Makenna's name actually means the gift of happiness:))
We adopted three embryos from them. Makenna was born on June 2, 2010 and we had a son born in October of 2013!!
I heard about embryo adoption for the first time many years ago, on James Dobson’s Focus on the Family broadcast on embryo adoption. I wasn’t married at the time, but I had childhood cancer and had undergone radiation on my abdominal area. Some of my doctors said to not worry about it, but another doctor said it could be an issue.
After my husband and I got married in 2006, we didn’t waste any time trying to conceive, as we were both in our 30’s. But we knew right away we were going to have problems getting pregnant. We discovered our chances of getting pregnant were very low—only about a 1% chance. I started thinking about the Snowflakes Embryo Adoption Program again.
We were matched (with a placing family) in March 2010, and just a couple of months later, in June, our embryos were shipped to our doctor’s office in Dallas. Shortly after that, we went in to prep for the transfer. It took us three rounds before my uterus would respond the way they wanted it to. The doctor thought that only four of our nine embryos were viable, but that we had a good chance of getting pregnant with the four that seemed the strongest. We decided to thaw the best two and weakest three, and only one survived the thaw. Our doctors said we could transfer the one or thaw the rest, but we felt at peace with just transferring the one that survived. And that’s what we did. Everything went beautifully, I got pregnant, and that was Elisabeth.
Now Elisabeth is fourteen months old. I don’t think of her as not genetically related to us. Having given birth to her, I don’t even think about that. I don’t think about there being any separation or difference. We are in an open adoption with Elisabeth’s placing parents. We plan to be very open with Elisabeth about her placing family. They are very happy for us, very interested and excited. They are not overbearing at all, but they do stay in touch by email and phone every month or two. They also sent her a big package of things when she was first born – clothes, toys and some other sweet things. They also sent a gold cross for her when she gets a bit older. It’s been just perfect. We all needed help, us with having children and them with being able to place their embryos with a family. For us that was the perfect match.
Our journey to embryo adoption
We’ve known about Nightlight for many years and have known many families who have used them for their agency. What we were about to find out was that Nightlight was more than an agency… it was a family of believers who would pray for you, cheer for you and rejoice when God answered your prayers. In March of this year, we received an email about special case embryos from Nightlight. I was surprised to hear of genetic families who were open to older moms (I am currently 40) and many children being in a family already. The idea of special case embryos (at risk for a possible genetic issue) thrilled my heart in a way that can only be explained as God moving.
When I asked my husband about this, we agreed that we are pro-life which means defending life from its very beginning. Surprisingly, he agreed to have me call and ask questions. From that first conversation with Nightlight, I instantly felt at peace with their friendliness and resourcefulness. A few days later we received an email from Nightlight telling us a genetic family with special case Korean-American embryos had come forward. We couldn’t believe God demonstrated his loving care for us and our heart by giving us a potential match that would fit beautifully with our family.
We continued to see His miraculous hand through the adoption process. Just as we began to fear a bit about finances, God did an amazing thing by blessing us with the Babushka scholarship from Nightlight as His way of saying “keep going..I’m with you.” Through obstacles with paperwork in our state and medical scares, each time I emailed Nightlight I was assured they were praying for us, would support us and that God was with us. I have worked with three different adoption agencies for our previous adoptions and never have I felt such love and support as we did with Nightlight.
God has given us a new platform to speak and share His story in our lives and His heart for all children... even “our babies in the freezer” (as my 7 yr old likes to say with big eyes as she prays for them!). We have had many opportunities to speak to our church and family to explain how the love of Jesus compels us as we move forward in this unique adoption. We have had the joy of choosing contact with the genetic mom of our snowflake babies and sharing with her about our process. We have been able to share our motivation and faith with our clinic and its staff and some have remarked that this story is amazing. We look forward to what God will do as I begin medicines this week and our baby transfer is set for September. We praise Him for giving us courage to walk each step of this road and praise Him that He is with us. If God can be with a family of limited means and small faith like ours, then He can do great things in your family too when He’s the One who is calling you, He will be the faithful One who equips you to do it.
Like many couples, during our courtship and early marriage we talked often of the day we would be parents. Children are a gift from God and we definitely wanted our quiver full! You can imagine our dismay after a year passed without any success. This turned into a seven-year journey of medical interventions.
Early on we considered adoption, but continued to pray to the Lord and ask Him to confirm His will for us. While on the Internet one day, I came across embryo adoption. I was excited to find that there might be an opportunity for us to not only adopt, but also carry the child. After discussing this option with our doctor, we were ready and eager to begin. Although we considered other agencies, we were impressed with the dignity that Nightlight Christian Adoptions brought to the process and the emphasis that they placed on the value of these little lives. At the end of 2006, I contacted them and began our paperwork.
In early 2007, we were so surprised and humbled that we had been selected by a couple to adopt their five embryos. We read through their profile and immediately felt a connection to them. After praying about the decision, we contacted Nightlight and let them know that we wanted to proceed.
Having gone through the embryo transfer in October 2007, we eagerly awaited to find out the results. I didn’t sleep well the night before my doctor’s appointment on November 12th. And at 5:00 that morning, I couldn’t wait any longer. I took a pregnancy test and to my amazement it came up positive for pregnancy. I dissolved into tears and woke Eric up to tell him we were expecting. This is one of the sweetest moments we have ever had in our marriage. We just couldn’t believe, after all these years, we were going to be parents. This was the answer to not only years of individual, but collective prayers.
My pregnancy was a wonderful experience, a truly happy time for us. It is amazing to witness the handiwork of God. On July 8th our beautiful baby daughter came into this world. The best day of our lives! As Eric says, “We’re smitten!” Although we thought we understood, we now realize that the emotions of love and protection that you feel when you hold your baby are truly overwhelming. There are still times we find ourselves in tears, simply in awe of Kaitlyn’s presence in our lives. She is our miracle!
My wife Pauline and I started our family late in life. Pauline was already 38 when we had our first child, a daughter who was conceived naturally. We hoped for a second child, but after a few years passed with no luck, we sought fertility treatment. Unfortunately, Pauline's fertility had declined significantly over those few years, and we were told that the probability of us having a second child of our own even with treatment was very low. We were advised to try IVF with donor eggs, but we rejected that option because of our Catholic faith and our belief that life begins at conception. So, we just prayed and hoped for a miracle, since there was still some remote possibility that we might conceive naturally.
More time went by without any results, and eventually we started to look into adoption. Our research led us to Nightlight and the Snowflakes program. We had never heard of embryo adoption, and we were fascinated with the idea that we could expand our family while at the same time bringing into the world a living being in need of a loving home. After a few conversations with Snowflakes, we began the application process. By the time we completed the home study and all of the paperwork (which took some time), Pauline was already over 45, and we worried a little about this, since we knew that many families donating embryos specify a preference for families where the mother is under 45. Snowflakes suggested that we might get matched more quickly if we would be open to donor families with a single embryo.
We agreed to this, and within a few months, we had completed all the arrangements to simultaneously adopt two embryos from two different families. Unfortunately, one of the embryos did not survive the thawing process, but the other did, and nine months later Pauline gave birth to a beautiful and healthy baby girl, who is now almost three months old.
We had been told that the odds of success with one embryo to transfer were relatively low, and we worried about that too, but it worked for us!! We feel incredibly blessed and grateful to Snowflakes for helping to make this miracle happen.
Adoption is a blessing, start your journey today.Get Started
