November has been recognized and celebrated as National Adoption Month across the country for more than two decades. Here at New Life, we are grateful for the many ways God has worked through our licensed adoption services to serve both birth parents and adoptive families. Each year we look forward to National Adoption Month as an opportunity to celebrate the children, couples and families that have been touched by adoption, both through and outside our agency.
If you have a story about how adoption has touched you or your family’s life, we would love to hear it! Please share with us on our Facebook page or by contacting us at adoption@nlfs.org.
This article features two topics of our work at New Life Family Services that we would like to highlight this month: an adoptive family story that demonstrates how we serve both birth parents and adoptive families, as well as an explanation of how we stay true to our values and serve families through embryo adoption. After reading about these two topics, we hope you get a better sense of New Life’s work around adoption.
One Adoptive Family Story: Jen & Harry Norman
Jen & Harry came to quickly understand New Life’s mission of serving birth parents and were grateful for the opportunity to support the mission by becoming an adoptive family. Jen reflects, “I had never thought about how someone else’s life would be affected by this adoption. It wasn’t just about growing my family, but as much or more about the birth parents. This realization changed my perspective throughout our entire adoption journey.” Jen & Harry have adopted two boys through New Life. Read their full story here.
A Unique Adoption Service: Embryo Adoption
Since our adoption services began in 1980, we have facilitated 791 adoptions, including our first embryo adoption in 2012. Staying true to our values and beliefs that life begins at conception, here at New Life we have taken hold of this new and unique way to grow families.
So what is embryo adoption?
In pursuit of building a family, many couples today go through In Virto Fertilization (IVF) treatments when they are not able to conceive otherwise. After this process, couples may have remaining embryos stored, and they need to make decisions about what happens to these embryos. One of the options available to them is to make the embryos available for another family through embryo adoption. Because we believe that life begins at conception, we believe that assisting families in the transfer of these embryos through embryo adoption is a way to both support the next step of giving life to these embryos, and assist a couple who is interested in growing their family.
How does embryo adoption work at New Life?
New Life Family Services works in collaboration with National Embryo Donation Center (NEDC) and the Snowflakes Adoption Program, a division of Nightlight Christian Adoptions in California, to provide embryo adoption for adoptive families seeking to adopt embryos for implantation. New Life completes the embryo adoption home study that follows a similar process to traditional adoption home studies. The adopting parents and the donating parents are then matched by choosing one another through NEDC or the Snowflakes Program. They can choose to meet each other and have ongoing contact just like in traditional open adoption. Embryo adoption has provided another way for us to build families in this unique, life affirming way. Visit our website to learn more.
