Sending good thoughts your way.
$10,000, for context.
I guess I’m the only one not offering support here, but if your husband’s out of work and you can’t afford to buy a home, why are you trying to have a kid exactly? If you’re having trouble coping with 1k/month, how the hell are you going to afford to feed and clothe a child? Is your job 100% secure - my friend’s boss is a wealthy philanthropist, and the contents of his will were recently revealed as his children being forced to run his business for a minimum of 20 years in order to collect on the final amount, or it would all go to charity. Do you have that kind of job security?
Seems like you’re baby-crazy without thinking through the financial dedication it takes to raise a child and give it a middle-class (what I assume you’re leading now) life.
IVF has a very low success rate, worse the older the age of the mother’s eggs - 10% at age 40. There is a much higher success rate using donor eggs, but that increases the costs considerably.
My adoption caseworker told me that many, many of the prospective adoptive parents have gone through all their money on failed fertility treatments by the time they try to adopt. You might not want to use your whole nest egg on one shot at IVF with a very low probability of success (unless you use donated eggs). But that’s just my view.
I pay about the same, including the price of a mid-range hooker and a decent bottle of wine. 
On the lower edge of middle class - and I don’t mind dropping it a bit of a notch for a short while. We’ve been worse off - at one point several years ago, we were getting by on $1000/mo, including rent. In L.A. When Oni no Husband is working again, we’ll be more solid. I have a very stable civil service job - if I didn’t, neither baby nor house would be in consideration.
And we’re doing this now rather than then because, as I said, I’m 39. If it’s gonna happen, there’s very little time left in which to do it.
As **kittenlm **will attest, there is such a thing as ‘compassionate surrogacy’, which essentially amounts to you paying only the expenses of the pregnancy but no compensation to the surrogate mother. In your case you may want to consider ‘traditional surrogacy’, where the surrogate supplies the egg and if you wish to save more money pregnancy can be achieved via in home insemination (which is nearly free to try each month, aside from the cost of ovulation predictor kits and Instead cups the sperm’s delivered into and withdrawn from by the surrogate). Google will give you lots of information on compassionate surrogacy. Good luck to you.
I’m sorry Maggie, that sucks. I’ve got nothing else to offer, just I know that’s a really hard place to be in. 
Well put. And I don’t see why you should in any way be considered to be the one not providing support. As I see it, painting a realistic picture and pointing out potential problems is a very helpful and supportive thing to do.
Get the house.
Adopt.
{{{that hug thing}}}
Good luck with the next round of IUI, maybe it’ll happen.
PS would you like a nice teenager? Housebroken, can be made to perform chores, orthodontia in progress and paid for.
Friends of mine just adopted. They got a lovely 18 month-old boy through the local foster system. He’s happy, healthy, and appears to be on a normal developmental path. I believe it cost them virtually nothing, and they receive some state assistance to help them raise the child now that they have him.
The notion that every kid coming through the foster system is somehow damaged is a complete myth. My friends made clear they preferred the kid to be as young as possible, and they were able to specify that they didn’t want kids above a certain age. One thing they were not fussy about was the child’s race, and because of this the whole adoption process took less than a year, and the time from final visit and approval to getting the child was a matter of only a few months.
Have you actually been told that having one ovary is affecting your chances of either natural conception, or IVF? I ask this because I was in (almost) the same position as you last year - one ovary, and a husband with count/motility issues, 3 years of trying under our belt, and the difficulty in deciding what treatment we could/should afford. The only real difference to you seems to be that I am slightly younger (33).
In terms of having one ovary, it certainly did not affect our chances of natural conception, as when the left one was removed two years ago, the right one took over, and started ovulating every month. When it came to ART, though, it did make some difference - what I was advised was that starting with IUI would be a waste of time because of the low success rates for this, and because, with one ovary, if I was going to use injectable medication to stimulate egg production, this would be better saved for a cycle of IVF, which has much higher success rates. We chose to jump straight to our first cycle of IVF, and we were very lucky, as this was successful.
When it came to going through IVF with one ovary, this also was not a real problem for me. I didn’t produce as many eggs as I might have otherwise (only 7), but this is still as many as some people with two ovaries. Can I ask if you have had your ovarian reserve measured? Our clinic does this before starting treatment to determine what protocol to use and to estimate how successful treatment might be. Even with one ovary, my ovarian reserve was very good. I know you are older than me, but you may still be lucky in this regard.
In terms of the motility issue, I would again question why you are trying IUI. Success rates are notoriously low for IUI, even with good sperm. When the total motile sperm count drops too low, the indication is ususally to go straight to IVF. Obviously your clinic is recommending this, but it seems a little odd to me. I hope this doesn’t sound too negative - I really appreciate how hard it is to make decisions about what kind of treatment you should be persuing, and how much you are willing to bet on a positive outcome. There is no simple answer to any of this.
Actually, I think the hardest bit we faced going through this process was the stage that you are at just now. With limited funds, we also had to try and decide how to spend our money, based on success so far (none), both our test results to date, and potential success rates for different treatments. it’s just a horrible situation to be in, and you have my sympathy.
I don’t know if any of the above information is at all helpful - you will have been given advice from your own doctors, and the age factor might make a big difference to some of this. I just wanted to let you know about my (similar) experience and wish you the best of luck in whatever you decide {hugs}.
My own experience. My wife and I are living proof that there is no faster way to get pregnant than to start the adoption process. The little Torqueling will be three next month.
Incidentally, I don’t know if you were aware of this, but even though adoption costs money, you get big tax credits when you complete the adoption, which can result in you getting most, or all, of the money you spend back. We’re still waiting on the completion of our Chinese adoption (it used to be a one year wait, but due to slow-downs at the Chinese Center of Adoption Affairs, we’re now at 3 1/2 years and counting).
Suggestion, Maggie:
Quit spending the money. Quit worrying about it. Enjoy and cherish your love with your spouse. Do the do whenever you’re in the mood and let it go at that.
If it happens, it happens. If it doesn’t, you’ve still got each other and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that.
Holy shit, you’re being paid to fuck? Damn, and I thought as a Canadian I had the best health care in the world!!!
Seriously, I can empathize, my wife was about your age when she first got pregnant, and it was after a while of trying and one visit to the fertility place (gave us the how-tos of how to plan properly, chart, etc., but no tests at that point, got pregnant shortly after). So, I can understand your urgency. At your age, it’ll probalby take a while longer to concieve, so my advice (of course IANAD) is to just keep doing what you’re doing and if it happens it happens.
If you really want a kid though, you can have one of ours. For cheap! 
Oni no Maggie, you have my sympathy. I was lucky enough to get pregnant on my first round of IVF, at age 39, but I know that it doesn’t always happen that way. I have a colleague who spent almost half a million dollars and ended up with no baby. I really hope that you have a happier story.
Everyone else, here’s an article on the top 10 things not to say to someone with infertility. So far, we’ve had #1, 2, 3, 5, 6, and arguably 7 in this thread. I won’t presume to speak for the OP, but I will say that I heard a lot of these, too, and they were infuriating.
You know the best way to avoid getting this sort of “infuriating” advice?
Don’t ask a bunch of people on a message board for suggestions regarding your unsuccessful attempts to become a parent.
I took her question to be more about how to handle the financial aspect, and how to make decisions regarding it. Figuring out the money part is a huge challenge, on top of working through the riotous emotions of realizing that kids won’t come to you easily.
I needed, and still need, guidance and help in working through the emotions and working through the best ways to build up and apply my savings. When you have a single pot of money to work from, and that pot is too small for the options available, it’s a hard spot to be in. I feel like I have one chance to get it right, and if I don’t get it right, I’ll miss the window to be a parent altogether.
I know it’s well-intentioned, but advice to relax, or anecdotes about other people’s miracle babies, are SO FRUSTRATING to hear. They do nothing practical to help me. They do nothing emotional to help me. I spent years “relaxing” about it, and now I can’t get those years back – years when I could have been investigating the problem and the solutions. I don’t find it possible to relax about a known problem without a known solution. It’s especially hard to relax about it when every month presents the same hope/crash cycle.
And now that I have investigated the cause of my infertility, the miracle-baby stories are especially irritating. I’m truly happy for anyone who was told they couldn’t have children and then did. Awesome for them. But what does such a story have to do with me? I can either lay out the reason that I can’t have kids and believe I never will, or I can go back to hoping for a miracle again. I don’t want to open that door again. Hope can be rather cruel, when you’re hoping for the impossible. When someone tells me the miracle baby story – and every person I know has such a story – they’re trying to offer hope, and I don’t want that hope anymore. It’s too hard and too hurtful.
What I want is the reassurance that I’ll make the right decision. I want practical guidance from people who have been there, about what it’s like to pursue IVF or adoption, and how they chose which one to pursue. If you don’t have experience with that decision, help me choose wise financial behaviors. Help me find good resources – a therapist, a financial advisor, a credit union, a friend who’s gone through this.
There’s lots of great things that could be helpful. Just keep in mind that every single person you’ve ever encountered who has struggled with infertility has already been told a thousand times to relax, or about a miracle baby. You don’t need to say it, too.
Well, the OP said:
This suggests to me that, if adoption were not expensive, the OP might be open to the idea.
She then said:
Well, as i pointed out, i have friends who adopted a lovely, healthy 18 month-old boy in less than a year, at basically no cost, and they get state financial support.
My point being: if the OP thinks that all adoption involves either (a) oodles of money, or (b) an “older, special-needs child” with “mental, physical, or emotional problems,” then the OP is wrong. I thought she might like to be made aware of that fact.