My husband, Michael, and I know firsthand the struggles of infertility. We were married in 2020 in the midst of the pandemic and looked to start a family shortly after. As time went on, we came to a conclusion that having children naturally was not in our cards, so we sought out medical help on why. We were diagnosed with unknown infertility and with that, our journey with IVF began. We knew that it would be a financial burden on us but didn't realize how costly it really is. Our egg retrieval went extremely well and on our first embryo implantation, we became pregnant with our daughter Amelia! Around 13 weeks into our pregnancy, my health started to fail... My blood pressure was extremely high, and I quickly maxed out on the medicine that I could take during pregnancy. At 19 weeks, I was hospitalized at UCLA for a week, and we lost our baby girl Amelia. Through many appointments following, they diagnosed me with an autoimmune disease with my kidneys which was triggered through pregnancy and attacked my body. I was told I could not put my body through pregnancy again due to this disease.
As you can imagine, the pain was significant. Not only did we lose our daughter but to not try again was heartbreaking.
As we healed, the idea of a non-profit to assist those who struggle with infertility and creating their families of their own weighed on. After much prayer and discussion, we decided to launch a local non-profit in honor of our daughter Amelia Molloy, in July of 2022. We know firsthand the struggle and the financial burden that can occur with infertility because much of this is not covered by insurance.
After launching in July 2022, we have hit the ground running and not looked back. The support of Kern County is tremendous, and we couldn't be more grateful.
Some of our accomplishments include gifting 6 Family Grants of 30K to assist in their journey of IVF/Adoption/Surrogacy, Monthly support groups, and 164 comfort kits handed out to those struggling with infertility to help them feel less alone.