Birth Parent Stories - Stephen

Stephen had been seeing Sarah (not her real name) for about a year when she got pregnant. Stephen was 18, and Sarah was 16, and both were struggling with depression issues at the time. The pregnancy was unplanned, and the timing was awful.

"When I found out, I was very, very nervous about how we were going to deal with it," said Stephen. "I knew I couldn't handle a child."

Complicating an already stressful situation was Stephen's relationship with Sarah's parents. Sarah and her family are Vietnamese (Stephen is Caucasian), and according to Stephen, her parents were not fond of him. Stephen and Sarah decided to talk to Stephen's parents about it first. That day, the four of them talked about how to approach Sarah's parents. On the day Stephen and Sarah went to tell her parents, Stephen's parents came along. Sarah's mother and father took it surprisingly well, and the six of them discussed the options.

"My mother suggested adoption," Stephen said. When Stephen's parents were younger, they had explored adopting a child through Lutheran Social Service because his mother had not been able to conceive. During the process, she became pregnant with Stephen.

"Everyone in the room agreed it was a good idea. Sarah, who was about three months pregnant at the time, had been considering abortion, but after we talked, we all thought adoption was the way to go."

About a week later, Stephen and Sarah met with Lori Nicolai, manager of pregnancy counseling services at LSS Adoption. She explained the process and hit it off with the couple. Soon they were looking at possible families who would adopt their baby.

"I was happy with LSS from the time we first met, all the way through the birth, but the process of choosing a family was difficult," Stephen said. "Lori helped us narrow down the couples we would interview face to face, which was very helpful. Then we met John and Nancy (not their real names). They were as nervous as we were during that first meeting, but they just seemed like really good people. Sarah and I talked it over and decided they were the ones."

The birth was still a few months away, so Stephen and Sarah were able to get to know John and Nancy before the adoption happened. They met several times, and because they had a chance to get comfortable with one another, there was one less stressful element surrounding the birth and adoption.

When Sarah got close to delivery, the couples decide that Nancy would be with Sarah for the birth, and Stephen and John would be in the waiting room. Unfortunately, it didn't happen that way. One night, at home, Sarah's water broke, and within ½ hour, she was in labor. The baby was born before anyone could get to the hospital to be with Sarah. It was a little girl.

John and Nancy took the baby home that day and named her Anna. Stephen calls the open adoption plan that he arranged with John and Nancy the "semi-open adoption." He exchanges letters and pictures with the family, and he hopes to some day see Anna if she wants to know more about him.

"I've done a lot of growing up in the three years since Anna was born. At the time, I wanted to clean up my act before seeing her regularly. Now I think about her every day."

Sarah had set up a similar open adoption plan, but has since attended a couple of Anna's birthday parties. Stephen has not seen Anna or Sarah since that day at the hospital. "Sarah and I have started to talk to each other again on the phone. We were going through a lot at the time, and drifted apart." Slowly but surely they are developing a relationship again, and hopefully they will begin developing a relationship with Anna. It's because of them that John and Nancy have a wonderful little girl.