Hellobee Boards

@winter_wonder: I don't have any advice on this since I was able to use my own eggs for IVF but I hope that @Leialou: chimes in since she and her DH are in the process of embryo adoption. She is active on the IF Check In threads or you could send her a wall message too!

I'm in a similar situation. My husband and I had to choose between a sperm donor, traditional adoption, and embryo adoption. My DH has a chromosome issue that causes tons of miscarriages and just makes pregnancy almost impossible for us. We did IVF with our own embryos and had two failures and one loss.

We ended up crossing sperm donor off the list early on. We both felt that if the baby wasn't going to be genetically tied to one of us that it shouldn't be tied to the other. I think my husband would have felt like he wasn't good enough if we went that route, if that makes sense.

We wound up choosing embryo adoption because I really want to experience pregnancy and have a chance at breastfeeding. It was also a more affordable choice than traditional adoption or IVF with PGD. We are using a clinic that looks at it like any other adoption so we did a home study and will have an open relationship with our donors. There are clinics that treat it as a strict donation and everything is anonymous. We are doing an FET with our donor embryos next month.

I wrote a guest blog series about my experience and decision so far. I can link it for you if you'd like.

@Leialou: you know I adore you and am so excited for you! I hope you had seen the Scientific American article I referenced above showing DNA exchange between embryo and mama ( I think I've shared it before), because I think it would warm your heart

@winter_wonder: Here you go! Adoption is an exciting roller coaster!

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/scientists-discover-childrens-cells-living-in-mothers-brain/

After our last loss, we got genetic testing done and while we were waiting for results we discussed our options a lot. Turns out we have no genetic issues that could be causing our problems, but we wound up pretty much settling on embryo adoption as our backup. Like @Leialou said, I wanted to be pregnant and hopefully breastfeed, and I wouldn't really like the idea of a baby that was genetically one of ours but not the other's. It was also pretty reasonable cost-wise, much cheaper than IVF or traditional adoption.