Adoption, Foster Care, or IVF?

As a gay couple in Utah, the answer was more complicated than we expected

I don’t remember exactly what time it was when we finally looked up and realized we’d been talking for hours.

We were on the couch in our little studio apartment, buried in throw pillows and blankets, screencasting my laptop with about 100 tabs open. We were talking seriously about building a family, and facing the first big question: Which path do we take?

Adoption, foster care, or IVF?

I could picture our family through any of those windows. Ryan leaned toward a biological child, but we both wanted to hold all the options honestly before landing anywhere. To do the work and go in with eyes wide open.

Over the next few weeks we talked to trusted families who had adopted or fostered, and the more we learned, the more our appreciation for those paths grew. The love these families had for their kids was full and unmistakable.

There was something so beautiful about a child finding a family — about parents opening their lives and saying, “you belong with us.” The families called to these paths were doing something extraordinary, showing up for a child in an unstable moment and offering them something solid.

Alongside all the beauty, they shared the reality. Timelines were unpredictable. Legal processes could be fragile. Birth family relationships continued long after placement, evolving in ways that required ongoing navigation. And there were children — loved children in good homes — still working through questions of identity and origin years later.

Around the same time, a training came up at work. I’m a therapist, and our clinic brought in an expert on supporting clients who had been adopted. I sat there taking notes on identity formation, attachment, and layers of grief — and couldn’t stop thinking about the decision we were in the middle of making.

When I got home that night, we went straight back to the couch. I shared what I’d learned, and we started imagining what it might feel like for an adopted child to grow up in our specific life.

We’re a gay couple living in Utah, publicly visible, inside a religious community with strong and sometimes divided feelings about families like ours. A birth family relationship — already complex — becomes harder to protect when one family lives in public view. A child’s story can reach them from directions no one anticipated. Legal uncertainty early in the process, at a moment when attachment is already forming, felt especially fragile in that context.

We kept asking ourselves one question:

What actually gives our future child the strongest foundation?

For us, the answer kept coming back to simplicity. To removing layers.

With IVF, there would be no birth family relationship to navigate. No legal fragility in the early days of attachment. No story that exists before our family does. Our child would still grow up with complexity — two dads, a religious community, a world that doesn’t always know what to do with families like ours. But those were layers we could walk through together, as a family, from the very beginning.

That clarity didn’t come without some guilt along the way.

Adoption is a generous and loving path, and I felt the weight of that. I had been sitting with the question of whether choosing IVF was the more self-interested choice, but the truth is, I wanted a biological child, too. And I realized that’s allowed to matter.

I want to see my husband in our kids — his steadiness, his humor, the quiet way he takes care of people… I want to watch those qualities find their way into a whole new person (and hopefully his curly hair!) The thought of a little Ryan or a little Charlie, some sweet combination of who we are finding its way into the world — that image doesn’t just make me happy. It feels like it was always part of the plan for us.

That night, we both felt the confirmation we had been praying for.

And just like that, the question shifted from which path to how to begin. We closed about 80 of those 100 tabs, opened a fresh one, and typed in a new search:

“Fertility clinics near me.”