As a woman who hated every minute of my time in the fertility-industrial complex (and I never even got past the early chlomid & IUI steps), and is now an ecstatically happy adoptive mother of a wonderful, well-adjusted child, I would like to ask everyone who's never been infertile to STOP telling people they should "just adopt." It's glib, misguided, ignorant, and completely insensitive.

Adoption is not always as scary and expensive as Samantha T makes it out to be. Yes, the process can be long and invasive (although for me I would gladly have filled out 10x the amount of paperwork and dealt with 10x the number of bureacracies to have avoided EVER being on those fertility hormones, which made me suicidally depressed), and as with everything else, it can take some hard work and research to find the very good agencies/social workers/lawyers out there who are in it for the right reasons and can really help you.

But the main problem with third parties blithely offering their advice on this point is that adoption is NOT a cure for the underlying problem: the profoundly frustrating, depressing, alienating, crazy-making realization that you are not capable of doing what living creatures were built to do--that you in fact are failing completely at something millions of other women do every day and every hour without effort or intention.

I agree with posters who think there's way too much at stake here--emotionally and physically--for LW to become her sister's surrogate. Offering to help pay surrogate fees might be the safer yet still satisfying route. But beyond this: before LW's sister moves forward with this, I hope she has sought some counseling from a therapist who specializes in infertility issues--solo counseling sessions as well as with her husband. Almost nobody understands how lonely and hopeless it is to be going through this. And when you're drugged up, stressed out, and have well-meaning but aggressively goal-oriented fertility doctors urging you onward, it is almost impossible to step back and figure out what's really important.

I think a lot of people get involved with IVF and then surrogacy, etc., only because they are stuck on the treadmill, kind of like addicted gamblers who keep digging the whole deeper because they're certain they'll be a pay-off eventually. The actual odds of conceiving through IVF etc are in fact very low. You have to get off the Pregnancy-Or-Bust treadmill entirely before you can make any other decisions, including the very complex, challenging decision to build a family by adoption.

In describing infertility as a problem, I was not talking about biology being destiny. I'm talking about the simple fact that failing to get pregnant when you want to be pregnant affects you on a very profound level--WHETHER OR NOT you ever defined yourself in terms of procreation. Illogical? Sure, but since when do emotions follow logic? For most of my life, I was far more obsessed with my ability or lack thereof to give birth to various artistic ambitions. And being from a fractured and rather unpleasant family, I also NEVER had any illusions about blood being thicker than water. Nor was I ever fixated on the experience of being pregnant--parenthood, not pregnancy, was the priority. And yet infertility still screwed me up royally. Maybe it was just the hormones, who knows? Even so, my point would still stand: that the LW's sister and anyone else in this situation needs to face and then start integrating the feelings of loss and helplessness BEFORE becoming an adoptive parent.

Otherwise you might find yourself pretending that adoption is just an issue-free substitute for biological parenting, and this attitude will not be fair or healthy for your adoptive children, who need acknowledgment that their situation, their origins, their process of identity formation are different than that of most of their peers. I am NOT saying that adoption is somehow automatically more problematic than biological parenting, and anyone who has both adopted and given birth will tell you that you love all your children exactly the same no matter how they came to you; but still, adoption is not the norm and can't be treated casually.

But back to the first point I made: it's rude and ignorant when random third parties casually tell an infertile couple "Just go adopt!" Of course, the upside is that it prepares you for all the rude and ignorant comments/questions you hear once you have adopted: "I bet her real parents were drug addicts." "Is his real mother in jail?" "How much did your baby cost?" etc etc.

Something I've learned as a journalist as well as friend to several people who've left abusive relationships: It is a CLASSIC part of the pattern that you fell madly in love and got married quickly. Abusers typically seal the deal as fast as they can so they can get on with the power trip--for that is what all emotional and physical abuse comes down to, an attempt to control every aspect of another person's practical and emotional life. The abuse here began before the hitting and even before the horrible name-calling: it began with the over-the-top courtship itself, this fellow's charm and charisma serving as the bait in the mousetrap. He is NOT YOUR FRIEND. His parents, no matter how sympathetic they may seem, cannot be your friends, either: there's a good chance he learned his control-freak ways from them. In the future--although I wouldn't go so far as to claim that all highly charismatic people are treacherous--you need to become very wary of people who sweep you off your feet with a Bollywood level of flattering words and romantic gestures. It can be difficult because there's this whole fairy-tale (in all cultures) of true love being recognizable immediately. It's not. Lust and intrigue may be there right away, for sure, but love involves the slow, careful, non-impulsive revelation of a deep connection, one that may take years and decades to uncover fully. Trust me on this.