A Journey of Infertility and Faith, Part 1 of 4

As we look ahead to Father’s Day, I’m honored to introduce you to a couple who have courageously shared their powerful story with me so that I might pass it along to my readers. To protect their privacy, I’ve changed their names, but I know you’ll be blessed by their story. May you find hope and encouragement, whatever your unanswered prayers might be.

Like most young couples engaged to be married, Eli and Hannah Abrahams discussed the idea of having children. Neither felt a huge push to have kids right away, and there was some talk about whether becoming parents was something they truly wanted. They agreed they didn’t want to have kids simply because everyone else was. Though they loved children, they wanted to become parents at a time when they could be intentionally present in their lives, attend their events, and participate in their interests. Hannah wanted to build a career before having kids. As a child, Eli had parents in the restaurant industry with its crazy hours and constant hold on Mom and Dad’s time. Now he, too, found himself in the restaurant industry.

The timing of their decision to start trying for kids was triggered by Eli’s exit from the restaurant and his transition into ministry. When he was invited to join the staff at their church, Eli and Hannah sensed it was a call from God. They were in their early thirties and the timing felt right to start having children as well.

“When we hadn’t gotten pregnant after a few months,” Hannah says, “We started talking with our doctors. We did all the tests. Everything looked good. No reason for us not to become pregnant. Probably just the stress of changing careers. Keep trying. It’ll come.

“We tried hard to be chill about it. That worked sometimes but mostly it didn’t. We found that we needed to grieve the easy fertility that our family and friends had that we had assumed would be our story too. I remember breaking down in heartbroken sobs at our church’s Thanksgiving Banquet as I dealt with the fear, grief, and anger of this transition from not-a-mom-yet to possibly-never-a-mom. The grief was real.”

For both Eli and Hannah, the grief still is real. They are just less surprised when it comes around now. They’ve never received an answer for their infertility, only possible guesses. The closest any doctor has come to explaining was the one gynecologist who admitted that approximately thirty percent of people who seek help with infertility are a mystery with no apparent cause. For thirteen years, Eli and Hannah have sought help, found a little, and kept going, without children in their home. Although a fibroid appeared to block one of Hannah’s fallopian tubes, her doctor assured her it wouldn’t affect a pregnancy.

Finally, in July of 2020, they received a positive pregnancy test.

Five days after the positive test, their doctor told them they must abort the pregnancy. The fibroid had indeed affected things, by causing the embryo to implant outside Hannah’s uterus. She could either have the abortion or risk losing her entire reproductive system or even her life. Either way, the embryo would not survive.

We’ll continue the Abrahams’ story with Part 2 next week.