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WITH CHILD: One Couple's Journey to Their Adopted Children by Susan T. Viguers

WITH CHILD: One Couple's Journey to Their Adopted Children

By

Pub Date: Feb. 23rd, 1985
Publisher: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich

A young professional couple try for years to have a baby and finally go the adoption route. After incredible red tape and numerous disappointments, they end up with a boy and a girl. The early sections are devoted to their attempts to become biological parents (temperature-taking, hormones, monthly blood tests, etc.). But for all their frantic efforts, the wife merely has two early miscarriages. The reader's interest quickens when they decide on adoption. Agencies prove hopeless (they can't even get on a waiting list), so they try less conventional contacts: lawyers specializing in private placements, foreign adoption experts, obscure out-of-state orphanages. At one point they nearly secure a newborn through private adoption, but the young mother changes her mind at the last minute. Viguers becomes so distraught that she is advised to visit a psychologist--who casually mentions that her sister had obtained a baby from a Colombian orphanage. Viguers and her husband start the immensely complicated and costly process required for a foreign adoption. Then her fertility doctor advises her that a teen-age Chinese girl, a new immigrant from Taiwan, is about to give birth and is looking for adoptive parents. After many forms, home studies, and considerable expenses, tiny, bumptious Nicholas is handed to them. Soon they are informed they have been approved for a little girl in the Colombian orphanage. More forms, Spanish translations, passports, consulate appearances and other complications ensue before they fly down to Colombia to pick up a sickly little girl infant. US doctors can find little wrong with Ruth, but she improves at an excruciatingly slow rate. At last she seems to decide that she's going to take hold of life--and eight bottles a day--with both hands. Anguish, hope, despair, exhilaration, and anxiety throb from every page here. But finally, we are rooting for Viguers and pulling out the hankies. In sum, an emotional sleigh ride to parenthood that its moments.