Help Lydia and Jacob Become Parents!

Hi friends, family, and maybe strangers!

As many of you know, we have been trying to grow our family since 2019. We tried to do all the “right things” that society tells us to do in order to be responsible adults and parents – get a good education, have a safe home and stable employment as educators, make sure we are in a healthy and loving relationship, be in a good place mentally, physically, and spiritually, etc. but time ran out for us. The past 4 years have been a long road and emotional roller coaster that included an ectopic pregnancy and losing a fallopian tube, multiple rounds of IUI, and an unsuccessful IVF attempt, all of which cost tens of thousands of dollars and have decimated our savings. After consulting with our reproductive endocrinologist, she advised us that our best chance at having a successful pregnancy is to use an egg donor. The anticipated costs are around $50,000 USD, which is more than credit cards, home equity loans, or personal loans can cover.

Why is becoming parents so important to us? It’s a yearning that is difficult to put into words. We’re pretty sure anyone who is a parent, or wants to be a parent, or struggled with infertility in their journey to become a parent would know the feeling. We also think we’d be good parents who want a chance to raise a kind, decent little person, who would join us on our adventures in life.

We need your help to make this happen and would greatly appreciate your support as well! If you know of anyone who might be sympathetic to our situation, please share this with them. If you aren’t comfortable making a donation on this platform, or for other ways to support us on this endeavor, please reach out to us directly.

FAQ that we can do our best to answer:

Q: Have you considered live adoption?

A: Yes, the cost is comparable, but the timeline would be much longer to bringing a child home (and we’re not getting any younger).

Q: Have you considered fostering to adopt?

A: Yes. The goal of fostering a child is to reunite them with their family. We don’t know how we would handle the emotional toll of bringing a child into our lives and having to let them go, over and over. If this doesn’t work out, we may consider fostering in the future, without the end-goal of adoption.

Q: Why does it cost $50K?

A: This cost includes everything: Cost of egg adoption, all ultrasound monitoring and procedures (including in vitro fertilization of the donor egg and culturing the embryos), medications, and cryopreservation of embryos. A significant portion of the cost goes to the egg bank to cover the egg donor’s medication and procedures to retrieve the eggs from the donor (basically the first part of IVF), and payment to the donor. 90% of this cost is refundable if we don’t bring a baby home after 6 batches of donor eggs (~6 embryos “good enough” to transfer), and if this is the case then we will return your contribution.

Q: How common is infertility?

A: 1 in 8 couples will face infertility (Source: CDC). In the US, among married women age 18-49 with no prior births, about 1 in 5 will have infertility after 1 year of trying. If you know 8 couples, it’s likely that 1 or 2 will have these struggles, whether they share about it openly or not.

Q: Are you using a gestational surrogate?

A: No, that would cost significantly more, and there doesn’t appear to be anything “wrong” with Lydia’s anatomy/physiology that would prevent her from carrying a pregnancy to term.

Q: Are you using a sperm donor?

A: No, as above, there doesn’t appear to be anything “wrong” with Jacob’s sperm.

Q: How are you handling this emotionally?

A: Our #1 support is each other, but we’ve got a lot of support from our family, friends, and therapists.

A little bit about us…

We met in 2014 when we were in the middle of our PhD programs (Jacob studying Geology and Lydia studying Biology). We got engaged in 2016 shortly after moving from California to Washington State where we had 1 year visiting faculty positions at Whitman College. We moved to the Seattle area in 2017 where we started jobs as faculty at a community college, got married in 2018, and in 2019 began the journey to parenthood. Lydia loves animals, tea, chocolate, cheese, growing plants, and Jacob’s dad-joke sense of humor; Jacob loves kayaking, exploring the rivers and mountains of Washington, and humoring Lydia’s tea and cheese affinities.

Source: https://www.cdc.gov/reproductivehealth/infertility/index.htm