Jayson, Karissa, A Little Guy, Jane & Ruby: April 2010

Yes.
Embryo Adoption.

I have been researching adoption quite a lot as of late. I think I've mentioned before, I've thought about adopting children practically my whole life. You see, my mom has a 1,6 genetic reciprocal translocation.

Wikipedia defines this better than I can: "Reciprocal translocations are usually an exchange of material between nonhomologous chromosomes. They are found in about 1 in 625 human newborns.[1] Such translocations are usually harmless and may be found through prenatal diagnosis. However, carriers of balanced reciprocal translocations have increased risks of creating gametes with unbalanced chromosome translocations leading to miscarriages or children with abnormalities. Genetic counseling and genetic testing is often offered to families that may carry a translocation. Most of balanced translocation carriers don't have any symptoms and healthy. But about 6% of them have many symptoms including autism, intellectual disability, congenital anomalies. A gene disrupted or disregulated at the breakpoint of the translocation carrier is likely the cause of these symptoms."

In essence...part of her 1st chomosomal material is on her 6th chromosome and part of her 6th chromosomal material is on her 1st. No material is lost, it's just sort of in the wrong place. I have no idea how common the 1,6 combination is, but I do know that it caused her to have 7 miscarriages before she had me.

I also know that I have the very same translocation. That might seem very personal, but I don't like to feel like I have to keep it a big secret. It's a part of me and who I am and it has shaped my life already in many different ways. Hence the reason I have always figured I'd probably adopt. I'm not ruling out having kids on my own, because obviously it's possible, but I am fairly certain I'm going to give both options a shot in the future. Adoption has always been in the back of my head as a back up plan. I always figured I'd try to have my own children first and if it was taking years and years I'd go for adoption. However, about a month ago I received serveral promptings to get adoption out of the back of my mind and move it to the front. It really doesn't make any sense for it to be back there when I know what I know about my body. I feel incredibly blessed to have this knowledge. Most people don't even know that they have something like this until they begin trying to have children. When my mom was still pregnant with me she had an amniocentesis (in essence, a procedure where they use a rather enormous needle to extract amniotic fluid to do genetic testing on to see if the unborn child has any genetic abnormalities) and it was then that it was discovered that I had the same translocation. It was known before I was even born. I now have a picture of my chromosomes, called a karyotype, which I've always thought to be pretty cool.

Anyway, all of these reasons are why I have been researching adoption as of late. We are ready to adopt, all we need now is to..well, have enough money to qualify to adopt.

While I was researching I came across two words: embryo adoption. I thought to myself..."WHAT?!" It sounds a little strange. But actually, it's pretty amazing.

You see, when in vitro fertalization is done, eggs are removed from the ovaries and fertalized with sperm outside the body. The embryo is then implanted into the woman's uterus and....tada! She's pregnant. During the procedure embryos can grow for a couple of days (I think..I'm not exactly sure on the time length) outside the body, it a petri dish sort of thing and can then be tested to see if the embryo will be genetically be able to form into an actual baby. (In all of my mom's miscarriages the babies never formed into an actual baby. She got pregnant, but during the ultrasounds only a sack could be seen.) If more than one embryo can produce life and a woman doesn't want to be pregnant with more than one baby at a time (or if there are three and she thinks she can handle twins but not triplets, etc.) embryos can be frozen and then used later. As a result there are now about 500,000 frozen embryos in the USA. So, women can now put their embryos up for adoption! So, the adopting mother would adopt embryos and they would then be implanted into her uterus via in vitro. Pretty amazing huh?

You can now actually be pregnant and give birth to a child that you adopted.

I don't know a ton of details yet and it's relatively new so I'm not positive that I'll try this in the future, but I'm DEFINATELY considering it. It almost seems too good to be true. I've never ever been opposed to adoption. The only part of it that has ever made me sad is the thought that I might not ever be able to be pregnant to feel a baby move inside of me. That is something I have always wanted to experience, and this makes that dream seem much more possible.

If you interested in more information click here or visit a blog here.