The large Catholic family spilling out of the minivan is a staple of jokes and a lingering image for many young couples’ hopes and dreams. When those couples cannot conceive, adoption sometimes emerges as an alternate path. In rare cases, however, adoption proves to be only one development in a long-running story: when an adoptive couple has biological children.

For many families, the path to adoption begins in grief over infertility or miscarriage and ends in generosity; for some, adoption is on the table from Day One. That was the case with Anna Grace Shaffer and husband Owen.

Anna Shaffer’s desire to minister to children in need was fortified by her husband’s openness to adopting. But once the adoption process was underway, the Shaffers, who reside in the Diocese of Cleveland, began to recognize the complexity and gravity of adopting.

“Adoption is messy,” Shaffer observed. “It can be incredibly beautiful and redemptive, but it is only possible when something has gone terribly wrong,” which, Shaffer considers, always results in long-term trauma for the adopted child. For this reason, Shaffer recommends that couples prepare to support their adopted child by addressing their own vulnerabilities through spiritual direction, counseling and/or therapy.

Shaffer and her husband were still discerning whether to adopt when, after a period of primary infertility, their biological daughter Zelie was born. Five miscarriages followed; and ultimately the Shaffers adopted Ephrem, born in December 2023.

Shaffer says that one of the great joys of the experience has been seeing how Ephrem and Zelie are “a providential pairing. She is spunky, confident, sensitive, compassionate, and naturally draws others in. … [G]iven [Ephrem’s] sweet, calm demeanor, his medical need … he is likely to benefit greatly from an older sister he can rely on to have his back.”

Christina Heddell, now a mother of six, and her husband Jay were surprised when she did not become pregnant during the first year of marriage; two years in, she suffered a miscarriage. The Heddells sought help from NaPro professionals, identified through their Archdiocese of St. Louis natural family planning office. Attempting pregnancy proved emotionally difficult, expensive and time-consuming. As friend after friend got pregnant, Christina’s fertility cycle would return. Her Catholic infertility support group became an emotional buoy, while the Church’s guidelines about ethical approaches to infertility became a moral one.

When two years became three, the Heddells approached an adoption agency through which they met their daughter Gia. Then, while Heddell was in the throes of caring for 5-month-old Gia, she got a positive pregnancy test. “We were over the moon!” Heddell recalled. She would go on to have five biological children.

Irish Triplets

When Brian and Amy Dragoo got married in their 20s, they expected to have children soon. Brian, who is a tutor at Thomas Aquinas College (TAC) in Santa Paula, California, calls those early years “a difficult time” precisely because the TAC community was so celebratory of the family. “Most of the young couples we knew got married and had children without difficulty,” Dragoo told the Register, “and we felt left behind; but in a way that only deepened our desire to be parents, because we saw good parenthood being modeled by our friends and colleagues.”

The Dragoos, of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, pursued local adoption in Southern California with a secular agency that offered need-based financial aid, keeping the process affordable. (It was a good enough experience that the Dragoos would advise couples contemplating adoption to explore local possibilities before braving the more expensive and sometimes ethically dodgy international adoption world.)

Early in the adoption process, the Dragoos’ social worker told them about the trope of adoptive parents becoming pregnant, warning them that it was a rare occurrence. The Dragoos, however, were another family where such a blessing occurred — and, in their case, the surprise pregnancy turned out to be twins.

‘I Already Have My Own’

Blended family life is beautiful, but approaching it requires sensitivity.

Elizabeth Marcolini pursued foster parenting with her husband Matthew. During the slow certification process, they began considering private adoption, at which point a friend providentially learned of a pregnant woman seeking an adoptive family, leading the Marcolinis, who reside in the Diocese of Arlington, Virginia, to volunteer. A second adoption followed.

Then, Elizabeth, the CEO of a local roofing and restoration company where she works alongside Matthew, discovered she was unexpectedly and joyously pregnant. A son, Lorenzo “Enzo” Pio, was born in September.

She told the Register that people do not always respond gracefully to adoption.

“I’ve been told a few times [after adopting], ‘Well, you never know; you’ll have one of your own next.’ And my response to that is always, ‘Isn’t it funny? I already have two of my own.’ I think you just have to get a little bit funny and lighthearted with it and also give the humorous course correction to the conversation.”

Christina Heddell says that she “would get really salty” when people insinuated that the adoption of Gia was a means to getting pregnant or allowed her to relax enough to conceive.

Adoption, she says, was worth doing in its own right; it was also hard: “I always say that was like my 18-month labor. I remember feeling [as if] none of my friends who are pregnant had to get blood tests and HIV tests and get fingerprinted in order to have a child … and I hated the idea that the adoption was a means to a pregnancy. It was not ever a means to a goal.”

Today, Heddell says, it is impossible to imagine their family without Gia. Her initial experience of infertility, she feels, was a gift: a time that allowed her and her husband to open their hearts to adoption and become the family God intended them to be.

Christina Heddell, while acknowledging that adoption can be complex, thinks that God will guide parents and give them the grace needed to respond to their particular child and suggests relying on prayer to access that grace.

“I do remember,” she said, “one time realizing there’s a loss for me, and there’s a loss for Gia, because … [God’s] pre-Fall plan would be that my husband and I could conceive a child and that her birth parents had conceived her in love and would raise her.”

That said, Heddell suggests that, in the aggregate, narratives of adoption failure can mislead: An adoptive parent is raising this particular child, and what they most need is to listen to this particular child’s needs. “I’m reading [Gia],” Heddell said, “and I am ready whenever she has the questions.”

Adoption and Biological Children

In the Shaffer household, little Zelie has welcomed her adopted brother Ephrem with delight. “It’s a wondrous joy to witness the ease with which children lean into life’s deepest, most seemingly complicated scenarios,” Anna Shaffer said. “Kids usually know they can’t understand, so they often daren’t try. The trust they bear for those in charge carries them gracefully up and over the chaotic bog of anxiety that adults face when we do not trust God.”

Not every family that adopts faces profound developmental problems or medical needs, to be sure. The story for Brian and Amy Dragoo has been fairly straightforward, given the relatively minor differences in temperament between their adopted daughter, who is somewhat phlegmatic, and their more sanguine biological children. The three were close enough in age that the Dragoos raised them “effectively as triplets,” allowing the girls the comfort of starting school and experiencing life together.

The Dragoos eventually had three more biological children; and the basic integration of their family from those early days remained. “Of course,” Dragoo said, “[our adopted daughter] and her sisters knew she was adopted from the very beginning, but that actually made it less of an issue for us or for her siblings. She was just one of us.”

In the Heddell family, the one clear difference between Gia and her siblings is that Gia is Black and the Heddells are white. This has been the norm for so long that it raises no comment, particularly since the Heddells have family and friends who also adopted. Still, Gia is 15; and with college or a first job, others may expect Gia to start navigating her own way to a unique identity. For now, said her mom, “I feel like the best thing I can do is give her this insulated base, of [knowing that] ‘You are loved; people love you.’”

Loving Kids the Same

Elizabeth Marcolini’s experience of the two loves — for an adopted and for a biological child — was similar. Holding her adopted daughter Zelie for the first time, Marcolini recalled the Scripture passage where Adam recognized Eve as “bone of [his] bones, and flesh of [his] flesh” (Genesis 2:23).

“All of a sudden I was just looking at her and I was like ‘heart of my heart.’ And that’s really the love that you feel [for an adopted child]. … It’s not fluffy, but it’s very real.”

Marcolini describes the difference between adoption and pregnancy as being one of two different gifts. Now with their biological son part of the family, she and her husband “are rejoicing in a special way … because the gift just is a little different. And in the same way, we rejoice differently at the birth of our two daughters. And just because they’re different doesn’t mean we can’t celebrate both.”