Adoption as an Alternative Path to Parenthood

Adoption is presented as a possible route to parenthood for Peter and Eva after infertility makes conception with their own gametes unlikely, but it is never a simple answer to their grief or disagreement. Peter comes to frame adoption as an honest new choice they can make together; Eva accepts it as a compromise while continuing to want a child who grows in her body. That tension becomes especially stark when the couple’s apparent agreement is set against a secret plan to involve Steef in conception without his informed consent.

From trying to conceive to medical investigation

At first, Peter and Eva imagine pregnancy as the natural continuation of their marriage. They have sex frequently and picture the baby they hope they have conceived; Eva reads nausea and changes in her breasts as possible signs, while repeated Predictor tests and bleeding return them to uncertainty. After a year of trying, their doctor considers referral unnecessary, citing the fact that half of couples conceive within that period and half do not. He advises them to monitor Eva’s temperature and time intercourse around ovulation.

The temperature chart turns intimacy into a schedule. Eva takes her temperature at half past six each morning; a rise of 0.2 degrees Celsius suggests ovulation, and sex becomes an urgent task rather than an expression of closeness. After another six months, the strain surfaces in a serious argument. Peter resists entering fertility treatment because he wants a child conceived through love, not in a laboratory, and says that their sex life has narrowed to a few scheduled days each month. Eva feels abandoned: her desire for a child is consuming, and she argues that medical investigation might uncover a treatable problem.

At their first specialist appointment, Eva’s examination, temperature pattern, and ultrasound reveal no apparent reproductive abnormality. Blood is taken, and Peter undergoes two semen analyses, each after several days without ejaculation. Both show too few sperm and poor motility. The results make medical assistance seem like the remaining route to a child, while also locating the identified fertility difficulty in Peter’s sperm rather than in Eva’s reproductive organs. Adoption enters a relationship already shaped by clinical scrutiny, timed sex, and the painful discovery that wanting a child together does not mean wanting the same path to one.

Adoption as a shared choice

Suggestions from other people do not initially offer comfort. A neighbor raises adoption as though it were an obvious solution, pointing to families nearby who have adopted children. Peter resents the well-meaning advice because it assumes that he and Eva have not considered adoption or foster care and overlooks how much they have already tried. He explains that they have been advised to wait until they have fully accepted that a biological child may be beyond their reach. An adopted child, in that understanding, must not be treated as a second choice.

Peter later interprets their fertility struggle as the result of losing confidence in the decisions that once united them. They had chosen marriage and then chosen to try for a child; when conception failed, the expanding menu of medical options left them feeling that they had lost their way. Adoption offers him a new shared purpose: a child with whom neither parent has a blood relationship. He calls this not a lesser substitute but a different, fairer choice. The distinction matters to him because it gives the decision a positive meaning rather than making it merely the remainder after treatment fails.

That resolution also sits beside ongoing mourning for Lieve. At her grave, Peter confronts his own avoidance: he has not returned since the funeral and has treated the monument as a reminder of his failure. He wants to feel love for the child he never had the chance to know, but instead feels guilt. Eva’s grief remains visible in the care she gives the grave and the flowers there. Adoption may give the couple a future aim, but it does not erase the child they lost or make their grief identical.

A compromise with unequal desires

Eva’s acceptance of adoption does not mean that she has stopped wanting pregnancy. While holding Sem, she tells Rebecca that she wants to feel a child in her belly, give birth herself, and experience the bodily connection of blood and breastfeeding. Peter, she explains, will not return to hospital treatment: no donor insemination, IVF, or ICSI. Adoption is the compromise because neither of them would then have a genetic bond with the child.

Rebecca challenges the assumption that this arrangement is necessarily fair. She argues that Eva, as the person likely to do most of the caregiving, would bear the consequences, and that an adoptive mother may not receive the same unquestioned bond as a child’s biological mother. Her view is presented as Rebecca’s belief, not as a settled truth. Sem’s presence sharpens the disagreement: Eva reaches for his soft hand and watches him return to Rebecca, while the warmth of that ordinary attachment makes parenthood feel immediate rather than abstract. Yet seeing Sem does not resolve Eva’s desire to carry a child herself.

The couple’s public commitment to adoption therefore conceals a private difference. Peter can regard the absence of a blood tie as a source of equality; Eva can call adoption the fairest option while still mourning the pregnancy and birth she wants. When she and Peter visit Lieve’s grave, Peter recognizes how strongly he envies Eva’s intense connection to their dead daughter. Their responses show that a shared decision about how to become parents cannot by itself make their losses or bodily longings the same.

The alternative displaced by a secret plan

Adoption is also set against a plan Eva and Rebecca devise without consulting Peter or Steef. Rebecca proposes that they arrange partner-swapping around Eva’s next ovulation and try again if conception does not occur. She calls the strategy soft pressure and suggests that a condom could leak. The plan is not an agreed alternative fertility treatment: it relies on concealing the reproductive aim from the men, including Steef, whose sperm would be involved.

After a condom mishap, Steef brings Eva a morning-after pill from a late-night pharmacy. He apologizes for his earlier reaction and describes their intimacy as more than sex with a stranger, but says he does not want another child. He feels that Sem came against his will and that, although he is trying to be a good father, he is too unstable and attached to his freedom. Eva tells him she is not pregnant. In the days that follow, however, she watches her body for signs, worries about coffee making her nauseous, and handles her movements cautiously even as she tells herself the chance of pregnancy is small. At work, the liveliness of the children around her becomes a source of strength against the thought of losing another child.

The later confrontation makes the conflict over conception explicit. Steef tells Eva that she and Rebecca stole his sperm with Rebecca’s consent and calls what they did criminal. His anger insists that fatherhood is not simply a resource others may assign him, even when the couple’s struggle has made parenthood feel urgent. The adoption proposal had offered a path founded on a deliberate shared choice and on the absence of a genetic claim. The secret conception scheme reverses that logic: it pursues a biological connection by withholding the choice from the prospective father. The contrast gives adoption its central significance in the story—not as a guaranteed resolution, but as an alternative whose ethical force depends on consent, and whose promise is complicated by the unequal hopes that Peter and Eva bring to it.