When were you ready to adopt?

[Jennifer89]

I have been ttc now for 18 months and have an appointment booked by nhs for April 2024 to begin steps for ivf if I don't conceive by then.
I am aged 34 with 35 round the corner.
I don't exactly have lots of time to decide but still not 100% on if I want to do ivf. The longer it is taking me to conceive the more I realise I just want to be a mother and I don't think it has ever been that important to me that being a mother has to mean only raising a biological child.
I also don't have a strong excitment with pregnancy, I just want to me a mother.

I have broached adoption with my DH and he is also open to it but thinks it is worth us trying for a while longer to conceive naturally but also understands if I don't want to do ivf and that adoption may be best path for us.
Honestly the more I hear about women's journeys of infertility including several rounds of ivf, multiple miscarriages etc to birth a child it all just sounds so daunting.

Were some of you in a similar boat that adoption just felt more appealing than a long quest to have a biological child?

I understand the adoption process is not straight forward but I feel that our journey would then feel like it is going somewhere. There are so many unknowns however with infertility.

We came to adoption via failed IVF - 3 fresh and 2 or 3 frozen.
We felt it was something we should try but I had really had enough (emotionally and physically) when we stopped. We then waited 6 months, went for an info session, waited another year, went for another info session, then applied.

You can try IVF and then look into adoption, but if you look into adoption first and then decide it isn't for you you will have made IVF harder. So I think you need to know you won't have regrets for not trying IVF if that's the route you go.

By making IVF harder, I mean you could be a year or 2 older and so less chance of success.

@UnderTheNameOfSanders I see what you mean. I heard also that couples need to have 6 months break from ttc before considering adoption is that correct?

I think I will likely consider trying ivf but don't think I have it in me to go through that process again and again. I think for me my limit would be one fresh round and potentially a couple of frozen transfers..

@UnderTheNameOfSanders Curious from starting adoption process how long did it take for you adopt a child and what age of child did you adopt?

Yes I think 6 months is a standard request. We needed longer, mainly for DH to get his head around things.

(My IVF knowledge is out of date, but my impression is that the first fresh round can be hit and miss, they learn a lot on how your body reacts, and then adjust the drugs better second time. But I could well be wrong.)

It took us approx:
15 months from initial applying to being approved
15 months from being approved to being linked
4 months between linked and moving in
15 months from placement to legalised adoption

Ours were 8 and 2.5, youngest is now 19!

We didn't try IVF. We TTC for few years and then went straight to adoption, with no fertility tests etc.
We adopted siblings aged 1 & 2, 9 years ago. From initial meeting to them moving in was 10 months, but our matching panel, intros etc was done quicker as foster parents were going away so kids would have had an extra move

@Jennifer89

I first started thinking seriously about my options when I hit 40. I was single and no idea about my fertility bur obviously very aware that I was very time limited.
I dismissed all the various methods of getting pregnant as too expensive or too invasive.
Like you I came to the realisation that being a mum was more important to me than how I got there. And that I wasn't a huge fan of babies😉
There were also some personal factors which led me to think that I would be good as an adoptive mum.
It's a very personal process and decision about how you get here.
Probably my best advice is don't rush into adoption- you have plenty of time for that. Many adopters are in their 40s, I was 46 when my boy came home.
So I would spend my time thinking about whether IVF is what I wanted to do.
Adoption will still be there.

@Ted27 thank you for the advice. That is lovely to hear your journey.
Yes you are right I still have time. If ivf/conceiving does not work then adoption is something to consider.

I guess we were ready to adopt because for various reasons we weren't even considering a natural or IVF route to be a parent, but knew we still wanted to help a child grow up in a loving family. I'd considered foster caring but it wasn't quite right for me (not the least because of the inability to make important decisions for the child) .

When we applied to adopt we were told that you shouldn't really apply if you'd TTC naturally or via IVF within the last 3 years or so. In fact that was a big checkbox on our Prospective Adopter Report (PAR). Dunno what the guidelines are now - that was 10 years ago. This gap was to make sure that you really were ready to adopt! Remember it isn't really about finding a child for potential parents, but more about finding suitable parents for the child. 10 years ago it was thought important that the child shouldn't be considered to be an alternative to a birth child by the potential parents, but an individual in their own right that you'd welcome into your family, with all their existing history, i.e. not 'claim' them as your own but allow them to grow into your family, much like a step-child or being a guardian to a niece/nephew I guess. Perhaps a bit fanciful of the policy makers, but with good intentions I think.

You probably have to expect the length of time between applying to adopt and actually having a child placed (assuming you are approved) to be about 2 years on average. I think there are fewer and fewer children being placed so you need to be prepared to wait.

With respect to the time between initial application and placement, a VAA recently told me that stage 1+2 would be 6 months total, and that they are strict about this so want you to prepare a lot of things before you start the process.

As regards matching, the SW said that if I'm not matched within 1 year of approval, there would be a review meeting. If I'm not matched after 2 years, they would in most cases withdraw the approval.

Meanwhile, I met a couple a few months ago who had just been linked and were waiting for matching panel, with a sibling pair, after 12 months exactly since they submitted their initial expression of interest - to the same VAA referred to above.

Has anybody had similar experiences of such fast paced placements?

@rihanna4

matching is as much an art as a science, with a dollop of good luck.
SWs can obviously only place the children that are in the system at the time.

so if you are looking for a brown haired blue eyed girl under 3, and the children currently available are all blond haired boys with green eyes over 5 then you will have to wait.
Also if 5 families are chasing 3 blond haired boys, 2 are going to be disappointed, no matter if they would have been well matched with those children,
Which is why if you can be flexible around things like age or sex, you may get matched quicker.
I’d also try and avoid outright no’s if possible.
I thought the last thing I could cope with was 7 year old boy with ASD.
What did I end up with - a 7 year old boy with autism.
Truth was I didnt really know enough about autism. When presented with an actual child and I looked beyond the words and considered how ASD impacted him. When I did that I realised I could parent him.
I now of course know lots of families with autistic children, I look at some of then and know it would be a real struggle.
So keep an open mind about everything and matching may be easier.

I went along to an open evening with LA and a year to the date later brought my DD home. She was 15 months. I was matched within a month of approval. Was very fast. We were only 30 and 33 so maybe age was on our side in terms of young parents and young child.

We never seriously considered ivf and went straight for adoption. Like you, we just wanted to be parents. I come from a blended family and both of us have adopted children in our wider families, so it was an easy decision. Looking back, I am glad we did not do ivf because of the physical impact and the potential losses.

We then relatively quickly realised that we were open to older children as well as younger ones and were placed with a 5 and a 6 year old some time later. We are now 11 years in and although we are currently having a rough ride, it was the best thing we have ever done.

Thanks for the replies. Also interested to know whether other agencies have a policy of taking approved adopters off their books if they haven't matched in 1-2 years from approval. The SW I spoke to said that if you're not approved after 2 years it indicates you're not open to adopting the type of children that need adopting.

We went straight to adoption rather than going down the IVF route. We decided that adoption was a sure thing where as IVF wasn’t and would just bring more heartache.
We both found the adoption process challenging and would regularly say that we wish we would have done IVF. I personally found the approval process very triggering and found it very hard seeing my weakness and things I disliked about myself laid bare. I struggled with panel and the fear of being found not good enough. Family finding was tricky too with the waiting, rejection after rejection and the heartaches of the links that fell through. Even once matched I could give you a long list of things I struggled with.
Obviously these things are pretty specific to me and my personal issues and had we done IVF it could well have been a whole lot more challenging, not to mention expensive, but with the benefit of hindsight adoption was not the ‘easy’ option we expected it to be.

I think @ted27 puts it brilliantly. SW can only place the children they have at the time. I think being open and flexible to age and sex, will be a positive. Ours was quick as we wanted a sibling pair, didn't mind if boys, girls or a mix age 0-5. At the time in our LA there were no others looking for siblings.

I was 30 and my DH 35 when we decided to start the adoption process. IVF never appealed for lots of reasons and it just didn’t feel right for us.

I’m now 34 and DH is 39 and we have our 4.5YO son who came home when he was 23 months. We wouldn’t change a thing.

I can’t really say why IVF didn’t feel right but we both just knew. We did know from the start of our relationship that getting pregnant wouldn’t be easy. By the time I was 30, we had been married and trying for 6 years with nothing happening and we’d had the adoption conversation for the last couple of years. When a specialist told us our only option would be IVF and then even that had such a small percentage of working to us, it felt like a very natural decision. Do not regret it one bit!

Thanks for the replies. Also interested to know whether other agencies have a policy of taking approved adopters off their books if they haven't matched in 1-2 years from approval. The SW I spoke to said that if you're not approved after 2 years it indicates you're not open to adopting the type of children that need adopting.

In all honesty some of it depends on where you are. I know in Northern Ireland, for example, it’s not that unusual to wait 2 years for a match because of the relatively few children waiting for adoption. In other areas there are more children waiting and fewer complexities in using the national register.

If you’ve been waiting for 2 years, with a number of potential matches that you’ve declined then, yes, I’d question whether you were actually open to the realities of adopting. If it’s been 2 years with no potential matches and you have a good degree of flexibility about children you’d consider I’d be questioning the matching process.

In adoption there are very few clear cut processes and systems, it’s rarely as straightforward as “this means yes/this means no”, most things come with “it depends”.

Besides which voluntary agencies don’t have children to place, they work with the local authorities to place children and don’t get their final fee until a child is placed so I could see them putting a limit on how long they’ll keep someone on their books with no sign of a placement. Local authorities tend to be much slower through assessment and approval but also more flexible.

Can't say I've heard of such a policy. You do need to get re-approved every 12 months if you haven't had a match. Basically to make sure nothing in your own circumstances has changed.

Whether you'll be matched or not isn't exactly an exact science. It does depend on how many children are being placed for adoption via your agency, and how many adopters there are registered with that agency with a similar profile to you. Our agency actually told us when we were shortlisted for a child by the family finders - it happened with several different children before we were top of the list. So I presume they saw something in us, just not enough to give us the nod in those first few cases. Or else they were scraping the bottom of the barrel with us. :-)

With us there seemed to be a flurry of shortlisting activity in the first 4-5 months or so, then nothing for ages. It had got to the point where we'd half put the idea of adopting on a back burner on the assumption that they didn't really want us as we'd always just missed out to someone else. So we weren't going to bother getting re-approved, despite our social worker still being encouraging. In fact things were going on behind the scenes and we were on holiday when we were finally matched just over 12 months after approval, and had to rush back to get re-approved before we could go to the matching panel!