Mom-to-Be Found Future Kids on Facebook
Richard and Rayn Galloway. Photo courtesy of Rayn Galloway.
When aspiring mom Rayn Galloway read in December about a family’s Facebook offer to donate leftover IVF embryos to anyone in need, she simply made a note of it in her mind. “I thought, OK, backburner if we need it, but we weren’t in that frame of mind,” she tells Yahoo Parenting. But soon after, the 26-year-old and her husband Richard got news from doctors that changed everything: that they both suffered from fertility issues. And so, on Jan. 2, they accepted the six donated embryos from Angel and Jeff Watts, parents of four, and may soon welcome children of their own.
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“My OBGYN said, ‘What if I told you I had a Christmas present for you?’” says Rayn, a community educator at the University of Tennessee Extension Service. The gift was none other than the same scoop Rayn’s friend had shared, about the available embryos. The Galloways, from Nameless, Tenn., had been trying to conceive for four years.
The Watts Family. Photo by Facebook
Angel’s Dec. 17 Facebook post, meanwhile, detailed how she and her husband were seeking an “amazing family who wants a large family” and hoped that they could find a couple with roots in Tennessee, like them, and with “a strong Christian background.” The prospective family also had to be willing to have open communication and meetings with them and their four children — Alexander and Shelby, 3, and Angelina and Charles, 16 months — so that the “siblings grow up to know each other.”
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“My doctor knew Angel’s family,” Rayn says, and her husband Richard, 27, a Waffle House manager, saw it as a sign. “He said, Maybe we should give this a little more thought.”
Hours of Facebook messaging and face-to-face meet-ups followed, and in early January they all decided to take the plunge. “We discussed all kinds of questions,” Galloway says. “Everything from parenting philosophies to our upbringings. Anything you can think of, really, to feel each other out and see where each other stood. Are we compatible? That’s so important for open adoption.”
As soon as they began meeting, any trepidation Galloway had felt began to fade away. “I thought, wow, these people may actually be it,” she says. “Their family is very similar to us in the faith they had to get to this point, and their fertility battle. We have lots in common. I’m pretty excited and a little nervous.”
The Galloways
The biggest hang-up for Rayn was actually a fear of letting down Angel. “From a mother’s perspective, I felt like, if I took those eggs and it didn’t work out, I’d be failing her,” she confesses. “So we talked about it and she said regardless of whatever happens, we’re a family now. That was a big comfort.”
Now the two clans are moving forward by working backward, ironically. “Typically the process would be that you go through a vetting process, get approvals, then find an embryo donor,” Rayn explains. “But we did things in reverse so we have some catching up do to in terms of medical clearances and contractual agreements.”
The couple is hoping to transfer the first set of embryos, which have been in storage at the National Embryo Donation Center in Knoxville for the past two years, by May. Once a child (or children) arrives, they’re planning on quarterly updates via Facebook, naturally, and visits between the broods.
“This whole thing has shocked a lot of our friends,” Rayn admits. Family and loved ones are all happy for them, she says, just surprised that Facebook is what brought everything together because Rayn hasn’t ever been very active on social media. “But we’ve been through a lot during our struggle with infertility and we’ve done a lot that I wouldn’t have thought we’d do.”
Regardless of how it came to be, today Galloway says, “this was absolutely meant to be. It’s been a huge blessing for us, a godsend, and we’re so thankful.”
The Galloways at their 2007 wedding.
The Watts discussed their search for a family with Nashville’s WSMV TV.
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