Last year my husband and I celebrated our sixteenth wedding anniversary and the gift of our beautiful daughter. 

A few years after we married, we started to think about having children. When I was unable to get pregnant, I was diagnosed with a defect in one of my fallopian tubes. A year later, at a doctor’s recommendation, my husband and I decided I should have an operation to remove the tube, as I was told it posed an imminent risk to my health. 

I was told that even after the operation I would have difficulty getting pregnant by natural means. At that time, my trust in the omnipotent power of God was not so strong. I trusted God’s help with some things and not with others. Feeling pressured by time and by our families, who kept asking us why we weren’t having children, my husband and I tried artificial fertility treatments. But they didn’t work. Later that same year, when we were not presently undergoing any fertility treatments, I got pregnant, but then suffered a miscarriage. After this loss and such an investment of money, time, and emotions, we stopped the fertility treatments altogether. We made the decision not to have children and to devote ourselves to each other as a couple.