Labor of the Heart

Adoptive parents often experience the double trial of emotional responses to infertility and to the process of adoption itself, called "excruciating labor with no end in sight," by one adoptive mother. Would-be adoptive parents cycle through grief, anger, fear, anxiety, frustration, and guilt-and back again. All of these emotions cloud decision-making, at exactly the time that adoptive parents are making life-altering, irrevocable decisions: whether to adopt at all, to adopt an older child or an