Fertility

Fertility issues is common in adoptive couples and is thought to influence at least 95 percent of adoptions. However, it's not the only reason for adoption and many infertile couples may never reach enough of an emotional stasis to be able to adopt. After years of treatments or assessing the options outside of adoption, emotional pains may linger for years. It's a case workers job to assess how advanced in the grieving process a prospective adoptive couple or individual is and how ready he or she may be to adopt.

One of the first things men and women should acknowledge is how common it is to encounter obstacles in starting a family. According to the National Survey of American Growth, 11.8 percent of U.S. women between the ages 15 and 44 have impaired fertility and 7.3 million women between those ages have used infertility services. It's possibly even more difficult to accept, then, regardless of one who pursues a surrogacy, infant adoption or older child adoption that the child will be either completely unrelated to one or more of the parents.

It is difficult to get past the feeling of adoption as a "second best" alternative to having a biological child, especially after exhausting time, money and other resources on trying to reverse one's infertile state. However, not coming to terms with the can sometimes be cause for a case worker to turn down a home study for placement.

Various support groups and counselors can help infertile couples work through the disappointment and fears that come with adopting a child that isn't a biological lottery of your family genes.

Some couples falsely believe that adopting a child increased their ability to conceive. While this is true in some adoptive cases, it's not acknowledged as an appropriate reason to adopt a child. It returns a couple to the state of mind that the adopted child was a "second-best" choice for building a family and this is something every person in the adoption profession is primed to look out for.

It is possible to separate a fecundity issue from the desire to adopt, and once a couple can do that then they are on the right track to adopt. Fertility should not have an affect on a couple's capacity to love and raise a child.