Henry and Deanna knew that they wanted to try to expand their family as soon as they were married. They tried to conceive naturally for a few years and also found out they weren’t candidates for IVF. During this time, a friend of Deanna’s suggested they look into embryo adoption. They found NRFA and ended up matching with a donor just a few months later! Here’s their journey through infertility and their perfect embryo donor match.

1. What led you to embryo adoption?

My husband and I married when I was about 42 and we both knew we wanted to try for children. Right away, we tried naturally right away even knowing the odds may not be great. After 4 years of trying, nothing was happening. We weren’t candidates for IVF because most clinics don’t want to do IVF with women in their mid-forties. A friend of mine who lives in California mentioned that I should look into embryo adoption. I started researching online to see how embryo adoption worked and what options there were to pursue this path. I stumbled on NRFA through an online search.

At this point we had only been considering embryo adoption for a few months so it was neat to fine NRFA’s site because this field is mostly new in the clinics where we’re at in Canada!

Few people are looking into embryo adoption in Canada and it seems to be a long drawn process here.

2. Tell us about the matching process. How long did it take before you matched? Are there any commonalities between you and the donor family?

After 3 months on NRFA, we matched with a couple from the US. We wanted a semi-open relationship because we knew we wanted to be able to tell our children about their genetic families someday. We weren’t picky about location. Our female donor has a faith and was very open and transparent about her life as well as her own struggles with fertility. She sounds like an amazing person. We said if a child comes from this, we would love for them to meet her. She has a little boy and has expressed interest in meeting us someday so the siblings could see each other.

3. Describe how the process of the legal contract and medical planning has gone. (Easier/harder than you expected, more/less work that expected, easy/stressful, etc.)

The legal contract process was easy and very thorough, and the turnaround time was great. The only problem was that the country we are in had a lot of questions. Canada is behind in the times for embryo donation and adoption. Some clinics want their lawyers to look at it and are not timely. A few of the other clinics were not an issue. Some places won’t give us a fee structure. We have an upcoming consultation with one of the bigger clinics in the Toronto area to see what they have to say.

4. What encouragement would you give to someone else going through the embryo donation/adoption process?

Because Henry and I’s faith is the center of who we are, we believe God will open the doors. Just trust God. If it was meant to be it will work out. You have to leave it to Him. Since we got married later in life we knew that kids weren’t a guaranteed thing. We thought that if having kids naturally didn’t work we could always do IVF. And if that doesn’t work out, theres a greater degree of frustration. We don’t know what will happen even with embryo adoption and if at the end of the day we are okay with that. We enjoy just the 2 of us.

My heart goes out to anyone who is walking through this journey.

We are grateful that this is how God worked to bring these embryos into our life. During the matching process and reaching out to different families, I just kept reminding myself “it only takes one donor family”. It reminded me of years ago from online dating and how God works through many people in order for people to meet their spouses that way. It just took one person for that. And at the end of the day we just needed one family we had a connection with and wanted to donate to us. Which we found!