Married in 2001, Amy and Nicholas Dill spent several years trying to have a baby. Amy had been to infertility specialists and underwent surgery to try to repair a misshaped uterus. But the surgeon determined it was a bicornuate uterus (meaning the uterus had two separate halves that shared a single cervix), and that it could not be repaired. Any pregnancy would be high-risk and likely not full-term.
So Amy, 31, and Nick, 32, who live in Vestavia Hills, Alabama, began to tell family and friends that they were hoping to find a birth mother and do a private adoption. “We slowly sorted things out and felt that adoption was where we were being led,” says Nick, who works as a
corporate recruiter and director of sustainability for Robins & Morton, a construction company in Birmingham.
Letting the word out to family and friends was a relief, they say, but six to eight months later they had progressed no further than a list of adoption agencies to explore. They decided they liked an agency that was a ministry to birth mothers. After background checks and home studies, the Dills were put on “the list,” and told the wait could be a year or more.
Then one mid-April afternoon the couple got a call from the stepmother of one of Nick’s brothers-in-law. Her boss, she told them, had a relative who was pregnant and thinking about adoption. Were they interested in a meeting?
“We met with the birth mother for about two hours, and asked all the important questions,” says Nick. “We told her that if she didn’t feel that we were right for her baby, that we had some friends who were also looking to adopt. All we asked is that she be seen by a doctor because she hadn’t been. She thought she was due in June.”
The birth mother was 26, unemployed, common-law married, and already mother to two school-age children. “She told us that she knew in her heart that she could not care for a baby and provide for her children,” says Amy, who runs an interior design business from home.
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