Welcome to your July issue of Connections, The American Fertility Association’s monthly e-newsletter. In this issue, you’ll find:

1. Message from the Executive Director
2. PFLAG Recognizes The American Fertility Association for Vital Contributions to Gay and Lesbian Families
3. The Adoption Option: What IS Open Adoption?
4. Listening to Your Heart
5. Natural Fertility Enhancement - Healing From Within
6. Support Services
   1. Support Group: Women Over Forty
   2. New York City In-Person Couples Support Group Now Forming
   3. West Coast Programs
7. Fertility Dream
8. Stay Connected

A Message from the Executive Director

Pamela Madsen

Dear Friend of The AFA, It’s summertime-and the livin’ is easy! Happy summer. I hope you are enjoying the long, hot days of summer. Summer is a great time to take a break and to try something new. Consider looking at alternative methods for family building as Randine Lewis describes so eloquently in this issue of Connections. Or pick up a copy of Gail Harris’s Your Heart Knows the Answer: How to Trust Yourself and Make the Choices That Are Right for You to lift your soul in ways that other ‘beach reading’ can’t. For those of us that struggle with fertility issues, it is especially important to be kind to ourselves and take a break from the stresses and strains that we face as we look to build our families-and summer is a great time to do it. See you at the beach! Sincerely, Pamela Madsen Executive Director

PFLAG Recognizes The American Fertility Association for Vital Contributions to Gay and Lesbian Families

For more than 30 years, PFLAG (Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays) New York City has worked to promote positive, supportive relationships among gay men and women and their families and friends. The organization is a leading voice in the fight for for family equality.

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The Adoption Option
What IS Open Adoption?

Michael Colberg, JD, LCSW, MFT

This month, The AFA’s Adoption Coordinator Carolyn Berger spoke with Michael Colberg, JD, LCSW, MFT to help define open adoption and then examine the pros and cons of open adoption.

Carolyn Berger: For the many people who are adopting domestically the term “open adoption” causes a great deal of confusion. They know it’s an important concept, yet everyone’s definition seems to be different. Can you clarify this for us?

Michael Colberg: Open adoption means different things to different people. Open adoption has been defined as anything ranging from an adoption in which the birth and adoptive families met before the birth and have not been in touch since, to an adoption in which letters and pictures are exchanged, to an adoption where the child has met the birthparent, to an adoption in which the child has an ongoing relationship with the birthparent. In situations where there is an ongoing relationship between the child and the birthparent, the nature of the contact can range from regimented visits to something more casual and reflective of what is going on for the child and both sets of parents.

The most important thing to understand is that in all successful open adoptions it is very important that everyone understand that the adoptive parents bear full and complete responsibility for the child and for making any decisions about how to parent. The birthparent is not in any way a co-parent, but rather has other responsibilities to the child.

It is important to understand that there are many different forms of adoption being called open adoption when reading books about open adoption. Make sure that you understand how the author defines open adoption so that you can understand what is being said—in context. If the author is saying that there is evidence that children growing up in open adoption are better adjusted than those growing up in closed adoptions, he probably is not defining open adoption as one in which parents exchange letters and pictures once a year. He is probably referring to an adoption where the child and birthparent have some sort of actual contact.

My personal definition is that an adoption is open only if the child has a direct relationship with her birthparents. From a child’s perspective, the adoption is not open if she does not know her birthparents.

Carolyn Berger: What are the possible advantages of an adopted child’s having contact with her birthparents? What are the possible disadvantages?

Michael Colberg: There are some important advantages to a child having contact with her birthparents while growing up. Each of us has a part of ourselves that is genetically determined and a part that is environmentally influenced. Open adoption gives the child an opportunity to grow up having a connection to both pieces of her heritage. If the child sees that there is respect flowing back and forth between these two pieces of herself (her bio and adoptive families) the child will have an easier time finding value in those aspects of herself. If a birthparent remains a presence in the child’s life, it helps balance out the feelings of abandonment and rejection that are normal emotions for an adopted person to feel. It is harder to feel “thrown away” when her birthparent remains a part of her life.

I do not think that there are disadvantages to having an open adoption BUT I do feel that open adoption is a harder road to travel at certain points during the family’s life together. Having a relationship with a birthparent makes it difficult if not impossible for a child to ignore or postpone the difficult and sometimes painful feelings that are a part of adoption. They have to acknowledge these feelings earlier than children raised in closed adoptions because they are faced with the reality of their being adopted whenever they have contact with their birthparent. Sometimes these feelings may be a bit overwhelming for the child. They are asked to make sense of very complex material at an age when they are very concrete thinkers. On the other hand, the child is still in the safety that her parents’ home provides, and her parents can help give her the support that she needs and the permission that she craves to learn how to process these feelings.

I believe that it is better to acknowledge the truth of a situation—even if it is a difficult truth. Real power comes when people acknowledge reality and then decide how they would like to respond to that reality—they were born into one family, and then moved out of that family and into their adoptive family. Growing up living that reality is harder but in the end it is very empowering.

Carolyn Berger: How do you set up an open adoption? Does this involve writing up a contract between the adoptive parents and the birthparents?

Michael Colberg: At the time that people make an adoption plan there is a pregnant woman who has a connection with an unborn child with whom the pre-adoptive parents have no connection though they hope to become that child’s parents. It is hard for pre-adoptive parents to imagine, when in that place, that they would welcome contact with the biological mother and father of that child.

However, as time passes and it is the now adoptive parents who have the connection with the now born child, things change. Adoptive parents frequently come to understand that their connection with their child is not questionable—it becomes a non-issue. Rather their focus shifts to wanting to provide their child with all that it takes to help her become a whole and healthy person.

There are many ways to set up an open adoption in preparation for this shift. These range
from legally recognized documents that state exactly what each party’s rights and obligations are to the other parties to informal and fluid agreements made between birth and adoptive parents.

There are some things that I feel are necessary to have in place in order to have a successful open adoption. The first is that everybody needs to understand that it is the adoptive parents who bear full responsibility for the child’s welfare and for making decisions about how the child will be raised. This means that at the beginning, there may not be any contact as the birthparent makes sense of what it means to be a mother or a father but not a parent, and the adoptive parents attach to the child and form an identity as a family. Once this is done, contact may resume. The second is that each adult should understand the unique role that (s)he has to play in the child’s life and respect the roles that others have to play.

It is helpful if everyone understands that things change over time and the arrangements that are being made at the beginning of an adoption are usually created to fit that stage of development. The child may eventually want to have a say in what happens to her and I feel that she should. Although this is often not done, I believe it is important to develop an agreement with the understanding that as life moves along and needs change, people have a responsibility to come together and adjust the nature of the openness to best fit the child’s needs in the present.

This being said, it is important that both birth and adoptive parents understand that adoption is a lifelong process and as they create an open adoption, they are forming a relationship with the child’s birth and adoptive heritages. This is very different from the kinds of custody agreements that come with divorce. Those emerge from the breakdown of the relationship, the failure of trust. An open adoption agreement should help people who do not know each other well begin to develop a trusting and respectful relationship based upon their joint desire to have the child grown up whole.

Michael Colberg, JD, LCSW, MFT , maintains a private psychotherapy and adoption consulting practice in New York City. He was a founding co-director of The Center for Family Connections-New York, and has served on both the Los Angeles Commission for Children’s Services and the New York City Task Force on Open Adoption. Michael has studied, written about, taught and spoken out on behalf of families touched by adoption in places ranging from Yale and Columbia Law Schools and Harvard Medical School to the Evan B. Donaldson Conferences on Ethics in Adoption, Assisted Reproductive Technologies and LGBT Adoption. For more see www.relatedbychoice.com. Michael can be contacted at 212 777 7270.

Listening to Your Heart
By Gail Harris

Gail Harris

It may be hard to believe that losing my twin girls 22 weeks into my ‘perfect’ pregnancy—after trying for almost five years to become pregnant—would teach me some very valuable lessons I didn’t believe it would at the time. After four failed in vitro fertilization (IVF) treatment cycles (using my own eggs and then those of a donor), and finally becoming pregnant on my fifth cycle, the blow was just too much to take. Losing my babies was devastating. It felt like I had a head-on collision with a Mack truck … and survived.

Up until that point, outwardly I appeared successful (I was a copywriter at a prestigious advertising agency, was trim, and had several intimate relationships before meeting my husband), inwardly I lacked self-confidence and spent much of my time second-guessing myself. Most women have been taught, and come to believe, that other people know what’s better for us than we do. I, too, often listened to others—my parents, teachers, doctors, friends—because I didn’t believe I was good enough, strong enough, thin enough— whatever enough I needed to be.

Either I couldn’t hear my heart’s messages, or I didn’t have the strength to follow them. This was true especially during my battle with infertility. Instead of trusting my heart, which over and over again said, “Hang in there. You will be a mother,” I listened to that negative chatter inside my head which said, “You are too old to be a mother….You’ve ruined your life.”

It’s hard to ignore that inner chatter, isn’t it? After all, we’ve been listening to it since we were very young. It stems from messages from well-meaning friends and relatives who tell us we should have no trouble conceiving a baby (and if we don’t conceive, it is somehow our own fault). Messages from magazines, radio and television tell us we must be mothers, have to be thin to be beautiful, or be in a relationship to be worthy of love.

No wonder so many of us are cut off from our own instincts. When I lost my twins, those negative inner voices had no mercy, telling me that it was my own fault. “You shouldn’t have jogged when you were pregnant! And that’s what you get for waiting until forty to have a baby!”

How cruel we can be to our own selves!

But for the first time in my life, I heard my heart speak even louder than my head. Somehow in the midst of all my shock, anger, grief, devastation and despair, I realized that I had a choice as to which part of myself I could listen to. I could listen to my head, which was telling me that I’d never get over the loss. Or I could listen to my heart as it welled up from within: “This was a sad and devastating loss. But it was not your fault. Trust that you’ll get through this crisis and become a mother. I will guide you every step of the way.”

I chose to listen to my heart. It showed me how to grieve and comfort myself, so that I could make room for another baby to come into my life. My darling son was born a year and a half later!

Finally, I have realized that I have all the inner wisdom I need to last a lifetime. By discovering the “language of the heart,” or the special way that our hearts communicate with us, I learned how to distinguish its messages from all those negative thoughts that I’ve internalized. I’ve discovered that our heart’s messages are always positive and loving (even when they guide us to make a different choice about something); guide us to take positive action; are direct, specific, and empowering; give us a gentle push; and are unwavering. They tell us to believe in ourselves. Take risks. Face our fears. Step outside our comfort zones. They always see the glass as half-full.

Perhaps like me, you have had difficulty distinguishing messages from your head and your heart, or perhaps you’ve heard your heart’s messages but ignored them. With so many important—and sometimes excruciating—choices that we have to make when we experience infertility, it can be so easy for us to doubt our inner strength and wisdom. Sure, you must research your clinic and treatment options, for example, so that you can make informed decisions. But have you become an information junkie? Are you too intent on listening to others? Are you trying to control something over which you may not have much control?

I’ve learned that our hearts are the best problem-solvers. We have a do-it-yourself guide to make the right choices, whether we’re choosing to do an IVF cycle, bake a cake, or find a soul mate.

The transformation I’ve seen in myself—from constant self-doubt to trusting my own inner wisdom—is breathtaking. By getting in touch with the woman inside of myself who speaks my heart’s messages, and vowing to listen to her wise advice, rather than to all my self-critical thoughts, I found the strength to grieve my loss with dignity, grace, and self-compassion. I learned that I am responsible for my own healing and happiness—not my mother, father, husband, doctor … or anybody else. It is with this newfound wisdom that I celebrate raising my darling son.

Sadly, this wisdom can’t bring my babies back. But it has helped me to be a great mother to my son. It has strengthened my relationship with my husband tenfold. It has taught me how to trust myself, so that I can make the right choices in my life and be the best person I can be. I realize now that my heart knows the answer.

How do you know when you are listening to your heart? When the desire to listen to and trust your heart’s messages take priority in your life, and you get to know their characteristics, you’ll discover a strong, gentle, loving, empowering voice you couldn’t possibly mistake for anything else.

Tips for Listening to Your Heart

1. Make the decision to improve your life. Your heart’s messages will help you to get started.
2. Begin to notice and understand the different qualities of the “voice of your heart” and the “voice of your head,” (i.e., the voice of your heart is gentle and the voice of your head is often harsh) , and how you feel after listening to your heart (You will feel empowered and good about yourself.)
3. Continue to practice noticing these differences. There’s an art to learning how to listen to your heart. Like any art, sport, or craft is takes practice until you get it right.
4. Begin to notice any inner battle that occurs between your head and heart throughout the day.
5. When your heart tells you to do something that is difficult, trust it! and follow its wise advice.

Gail Harris is the author of Your Heart Knows the Answer: How to Trust Yourself and Make the Choices That Are Right for You (Inner Ocean, 2005).

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Natural Fertility Enhancement - Healing From Within
Randine Lewis, Ph.D.

Randine Lewis, Ph.D.

Let me take you back to my life fifteen years ago. After medical school, I had just passed my national medical boards and had the whole world at my disposal. I had a head full of scientific knowledge, and had a professional life full of possibility. I was physically fit, and looked great from the outside. I married a physician and together we planned our perfect future, which of course included children. That’s when I was diagnosed with premature ovarian failure… irreversibly infertile. That’s when my entire life changed. That’s when I learned to find my fertility within and live it. Through my disheartening attempts at reproductive medicine, I came to recognize that my doctors couldn’t cure me. In fact, the only thing they could offer me were drugs to overcome my dire prognosis, which had a dismal chance of any success. I had to discover why my body had failed me, and find the cure myself. I had to go outside of science and find out about healing. True healing; the kind that comes from within.

Don’t get me wrong; I love science and respect western medicine. However, medicine doesn’t produce babies; Life does. Science studies the nature of things, in isolation. In order to adhere to scientific proof, the subject matter being studied must conform to double blinded, reproducible, placebo-controlled studies whose results show up in a laboratory. The studies themselves take out the interaction with the environment, the state of mind, the background, the emotions, and the process of living life. In order to be ‘proven’, the subject of investigation must be an idealized, closed system with no interaction with its environment. The physical chemist and Nobel laureate Ilya Prigogine, author of Order Out of Chaos, From Being to Becoming, and Exploring Complexity, recognized that science neglected to take into account the fact that highly complex systems, like human beings, plants and animals, interact with their surroundings. Open systems, those which interact with their environment, disperse disorder through their actions and exchange energy with the environment. In fact, Prigogine’s hypothesis proved that order, evolution and growth are the product of interacting with the environment. We aren’t closed systems. We can’t merely be given a drug and expected to produce children. Our interactions with ourselves, with our environment, and with a higher sense of purpose, are all part of our reproductive process. I had to evaluate all of my life interactions– body, mind, and spirit, and find out if my own lifestyle was impeding my attempts to conceive.

I looked at my physical body – I knew nutrition. I ate a low fat diet. I ran six miles per day. I lifted weights. I did hundreds of sit-ups every day. According to the charts and my doctor, I had the ideal body weight for my height. I was considered the model of health, from the outside. Yet inside, I hadn’t a clue what was going on in my reproductive system. I was closed off from what was going on in my ovaries, uterus, emotions, and brain chemicals. I didn’t know how to breathe deeply. I didn’t know how to slow down. I had to develop a relationship with my own body before I could heal it. I learned to trust my body’s messages and balance my own energies.

According to Chinese medicine, the “mind” includes thinking, the emotional process, and the soul. I had been conditioned my whole life to produce, and to get whatever I set my mind on. I was a thinker and a doer. But I had never been taught how to be myself. I had to look at how my own attitudes were impacting my ability to reproduce. Self-help processes told me that I had to think positively, but I didn’t know how to be gut level honest. I had to learn what aspects of my own thinking and emotional process were standing in my way. I learned to be comfortable in my own skin. I learned to understand and love myself.

In my experience, there is no more important aspect to the reproductive process than the spirit. And I don’t mean religious beliefs. I mean the ability to live life on life’s terms, to have reverence for a higher process outside of ourselves. When women “let go” instead of trying to control the process, they get pregnant - if body and mind are in balance. Chinese medicine views energy as the animating process that enlivens form. This energy cannot be controlled; only allowed. It can’t be studied or evaluated in a laboratory. It is Life itself. A woman’s body, mind, and spirit, must be balanced, calm, open, and receptive, or implantation cannot occur. A pregnancy can’t be forced.

You see, I believe we are all inherently fertile. Our fertility is an expression of a healthy body, mind, and spirit, living in harmony with life.

Randine Lewis, Ph.D., licensed acupuncturist, herbalist, and international speaker, is the author of The Infertility Cure, 2004, Little Brown & Company, and leads fertility enhancing retreats worldwide. For more information, see www.theFertileSoul.com or call 1-866-4-My-Fertility

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Support Services

Support Group: Women Over Forty

Starting on September 14, 2006
Thursdays from 7:30 to 9 P.M.
17 East 96 Street, New York City
Five weeks at $30 per session

Contact Susan Frank, LCSW
(212)427-4193
susanfranknj@yahoo.com

New York City In-Person Couples Support Group Now Forming

This group will focus on how during fertility treatments couples are often at "different places" on what paths they are ready to pursue during their decision making process. The participatatnts will learn techniques in helping them resolve their differences, even when partners are in disagreement in how they desire to pursue parenthood.

Facilitated by Joan Winograd, LCSW, and AFA Support Group Leader. Space is limited.

Contact Joan at 212-362-4003 or e-mail at Joanwino@aol.com with your contact information.

West Coast Programs

Four Seminars Offered

• EGG DONATION: WORKING WITH A THIRD PARTY
• CHOOSING SINGLE PARENTING
• CREATING A SUCCESSFUL SURROGATE ARRANGEMENT
• GAY AND LESBIAN PARENTING

The American Fertility Association is sponsoring separate discussion groups for patients considering alternative family building options. The emotional, medical and practical aspects of each of these arrangements will be explored, such that prospective parents can make an informed decision about whether these plans are the “right” choice for them.

Elaine R. Gordon, Ph.D. is a licensed clinical psychologist with a specialty in reproductive medicine. She has worked in the field for twenty years helping individuals and couples build families through non-traditional options. She is the author of “Mommy, Did I Grow in Your Tummy? Where some Babies Come From”.

Ellen Speyer, M.A., M.S., MFT. is a psychotherapist with twenty years with working with assisted reproduction, pregnancy loss, surrogacy, and adoption. She is a retired Chair of the Education Committee for the Mental Health Professional Group of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine.

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The American Fertility Association (AFA) presents

Building Families One Step at a Time

Fertility Dream races and walks are breaking new ground,
promoting health and a sense of unity within the fertility
community and among our supporters nationwide.

Join us in 2006 to build fertility awareness and raise funds for
research and advocacy. Join our cause and say:
“ Together we can do what we cannot do alone”

Anyone can participate in Fertility Dream races and walks:
fitness enthusiasts, elite runners, and even those who have never
participated in a race before. The AFA will help find the pace that
is right for you.

The Fertility Dream Calendar

August 13 ~ Chicago
(Chicago Distance Classic)
September 10 ~ Danbury
(Fertility Dream 5K)
September 10 ~ Boston
(Race for the Cure)
January 7, 2007 ~ Los Angeles
(OC Marathon)

Anyone raising $5,000 or more in pledges will receive an all expense paid trip to a
Fertility Dream race. Round Trip Airfare, Two nights lodging, Meals, and Race entry.
See Website for details.

For more information, call (888) 917-3777 or visit www.theAFA.org

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Online Education Session Schedule—July–August 2006