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Bringing back baby: Desperate to have a child, a Tulsa woman travels to Kazakhstan -- and finds love
(Tulsa World (OK) (KRT) Via Thomson Dialog NewsEdge) Mar. 26--The hotel room was cramped. Her hot rollers didn't work. The water was carbonated, and breakfast was hardly recognizable.
But when Julie Van Boening began the day in Almaty, Kazakhstan, mediocre hair and a half-empty stomach were trivial concerns.
She knew that day would forever change her world.
Van Boening's lifelong ache for a child would be close to quelled that afternoon when she met her completing daughter for the first time.
The never-married 41-year-old is in Kazakhstan finalizing the adoption of a 6-month-old girl to be named Katelyn Elise. The round-faced child with eyes almost too elegant for a baby is in Koksheteau at a hospital where native orphans stay for the first several months of their life.
Van Boening arrived in Kazakhstan earlier this month. She entered the hospital for the first time and saw Katelyn lying in a crib.
"I asked if I could pick her up, and when I did, it was probably the closest experience to heaven I can describe," Van Boening said in an e-mail from Kazakhstan.
"For the first five minutes, as I snuggled and talked with her, tears of joy continued to flow, and it was as though a cleansing was taking place. All the challenges and trials that had led me to this moment faded away and the only thing that matters now was Katelyn."
This is motherhood, but it's not how Van Boening imagined it. Growing up, she always dreamed of having children while other girls aspired to be nurses or lawyers.
Her ideal picture always included a husband.
"But Mr. Wonderful didn't come along on my timetable," said Van Boening, a successful mortgage broker.
"Every year, my birthdays became more depressing because this part of me was missing."
With no marriage prospects and the haunting knowledge that a woman's fertility decreases each year after the age of 35, Van Boening began the journey to motherhood alone.
She would rather have done it with a husband and fully agrees that a happy two-parent home is ideal for a child.
"But I know that I have a tremendous capacity to love a child and not having a man in the home does not diminish that," she said.
Van Boening still toils occasionally with her decision to parent alone, but she knew her time for motherhood was running out. The opportunity for a husband isn't.
"Will I add him some time in the future? I'm totally hopeful that one day God is going to bring along Mr. Wonderful," she said. "I just didn't want to go through most of my life wondering, 'What if.' "
Van Boening began the process to adopt Katelyn in July when she applied for a child through World Partners Adoption Inc., a nonprofit international adoption agency outside of Atlanta that works with several countries in addition to Kazakhstan.
Van Boening hopes to complete the adoption of Katelyn next month, ending an emotional labyrinthian path to motherhood.
She began trying to adopt domestically in the fall of 2003, but found it difficult as a single female, especially now that many women with an unwanted pregnancy choose the adoptive parents and usually prefer a married couple.
Van Boening also was limited because she wanted an infant, the younger the better.
She said she tried to adopt an orphan in this county but was told the wait would be five to seven years. Two attempts she made to adopt a child through acquaintances fell through when the biological mothers decided to keep their babies.
Emotionally weary from the rejection and disappointments of domestic adoption, Van Boening decided to bear a child on her own and found a sperm donor through Xytex Corp.
This is the case with most sperm banks across the country as more and more professional, single women -- once focused more on career than family -- tend to their ticking biological clocks.
The birth rate for women aged 20 to 24 has declined to the lowest rate on record, while birth rates for women ages 30 to 39 rose to the highest reported since the 1960s, according to the latest numbers from the U.S. Census Bureau.
The same report said the birth rate for women 40 to 44 years old also rose to its highest level in decades.
Van Boening bought six vials of a donor's sperm for about $1,500.
She took hormones to boost fertility and beginning in April 2004 was inseminated six times by a doctor over the course of one year.
Each time her dreaded period arrived. Pregnancy slipped further through her fingers, and so did money. The insemination process totaled more than $5,000, none of which was covered by her insurance.
Van Boening never imagined getting pregnant would be difficult. She said she has no health problems and no women in her family experiences fertility issues.
But women are born with all of their eggs, and as they reach their mid-30s the quality of those eggs decline. The risk of miscarriage increases by about 10 percent after age 35 and 20 percent after age 40, according to the Mayo Clinic.
In vitro insemination was the next option for Van Boening, but at another $15,000 for each attempt and no guarantee of pregnancy, she turned to overseas adoption.
She has a good career and healthy relationships with friends and family, but felt incomplete without a child.
"For some women it's not an issue," she said. "They don't feel a loss at not having a child, but for me, it was a deal-breaker. It was huge."
Last summer, she began researching international adoption and chose World Partners because they worked with Kazakhstan, a country known for treating its orphans extremely well. World Partners also allows single women to adopt.
Seven months after applying, World Partners sent Van Boening information about Katelyn, asking whether she would like to adopt the child.
Van Boening hardly hesitated when she learned she and Katelyn shared a birthday -- Sept. 3. It was on that day last year that Van Boening asked God to send her a child within the year.
"The year I was praying for her, God was sending her to me," Van Boening said. "People think (our shared birthday) is a coincidence, but it's not. I know in my heart that God created her for me. She has a purpose in her life, and I'm going to help her find it."
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Leigh Woosley 581-8465
leigh.woosley@tulsaworld.com
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