Hadwins continue to change lives through infertility awareness initiatives

Jessica Hadwin looked out a plane window in the spring of 2019 to see a unique double rainbow. There were two vertical strips of color coming out of a collection of clouds, straight toward the ground – a bright splash through the darkness. She needed that. She wondered if it was a sign.

About a year later – nine months, to be exact – that double rainbow represented their baby girl Maddox. Their fighter. A glimpse of light after years of darkness.

A “Rainbow Baby” is a term for a child born to a family after experiencing previous child loss.

Maddox Amelia Hadwin was born in January of 2020, one of about four million births per year in the U.S. via In vitro fertilization (IVF). Her birth came after the Hadwins lost two previous pregnancies. Once their little miracle was born, the pair immediately wanted to give back to others who were in the position they were once in.

In May 2020 their non-profit organization was approved, and so began The Hadwin Family Foundation and Maddy’s Miracle Grant.

June is World Infertility Awareness Month and the work the Hadwins have done – three grants have been bestowed on deserving families so far – is getting celebrated, and deservedly so.

“Before (Maddox) was born we talked so much about IVF and the discrepancy of who can do it and who can’t because it almost always comes down to funds. You can at least have a chance to buy yourself a chance for a child, but you can’t because of your financial status. We were talking about it all through IVF because we were blown away at how much it costs and the whole process was so intense,” Hadwin says. “You’re going through so much on the physical and emotional aspect, and we haven’t really had to think about the financial burden.

“Having Maddy’s Miracle Grant has really opened my eyes to how much that piece is weighted in the process. It’s make-or-break for most people.”

The cost of IVF varies, but could run upwards of $20,000, without including the cost of medication. Some families, Hadwin says, have done 10 rounds of IVF. Others are nearly at the point of giving up trying to have a child because they’ve re-mortgaged their home, gone into deep credit card debt or had to take on side jobs. The big response to the grants is that they have been life-changing. Many of the grant recipients already have done the IVF process once or twice and exhausted what they’ve saved. Some grant applicants did everything they needed leading into IVF – appointments, physical and mental preparations, etc. – but stopped short of IVF itself because of the final cost.

The applicants all know that just having the money to do IVF is one part of the puzzle. For women under 35, the chance for a successful IVF pregnancy is just 54.5 percent, and the number decreases as women get older.

“Everyone is pumped about (receiving the grant) but in the back of our minds we know it’s one step and we don’t know how it’ll play out,” Hadwin explains. “But when they find out (they are receiving the grant) they are ecstatic. One less worry, at the time, is the financial aspect of that.”

IVF is a multi-part process to try to encourage a pregnancy with injections (1-2 per day, about 90 total) that stimulate the body to produce eggs. Eggs are then retrieved, before the actual transfer of a developed embryo into a uterus. From there, it’s a waiting game to see if any of those embryos turn into a fetus.

Jessica Hadwin is an Acute Care Nurse Practitioner and doesn’t look at needles any differently these days (“I did all of them, but Adam finally did one,” she says with a laugh.) despite them playing such a big part in the IVF journey.

While the process is physically demanding, it’s a mental effort, as well. And a long wait. Hadwin (who wrote their entire pregnancy story in a multi-part blog on the foundation’s website) says only two of their fertilized eggs managed to turn into embryos that made it to the fifth day of development. This represents a major milestone, because once this happens they can be frozen and transferred.

During the week of THE PLAYERS Championship in 2019, Jessica visited a hospital in Jacksonville to ensure she was a viable candidate to proceed with the IVF process – if there ended up being an embryo good enough to transfer. She was not prepared for the physical and mental discomfort after that appointment. It’s no surprise Adam Hadwin missed the cut that week.

Sometimes there is a rainbow hiding in the clouds and things work out after all. A few days after their appointment, the Hadwins got another call – both embryos had come back “genetically normal” and there was one male and one female ready to go. Jessica went through a “mock cycle” to determine if her body was able to move onto the official embryo transfer. After plenty of conversations and some tears, they decided to transfer both the male and female embryo and accept whatever happened next.

The transfer was indeed successful. Jessica Hadwin took multiple pregnancy tests from different brands, all of which came back positive. However, just before boarding a flight with Adam a short time later, she used the washroom and saw faint drops of red.

She held that information to herself, though. And that’s when she saw the rainbow out the plane’s window. A sign, indeed.

They went to their first ultrasound about a week later. Jessica was twitching uncontrollably from anxiety. Ultrasounds from previous pregnancies had been extremely traumatic. This one, however, was not. There was Maddox, growing along, heart beating. Relief. Emotion. Success.

Given what the Hadwins had gone through to get to this point, they kept the news of their pregnancy tight. You could count on one hand (plus one thumb) how many people knew Jessica Hadwin was pregnant before Maddox was welcomed into the world. Keeping it a secret was a result of her previous pregnancy loss and ongoing stress from the last few years.

After Maddox was born, though, she took a photo of her daughter in her bassinet at the hospital and sent a group text to her family, including her four older brothers.

“I was like, ‘Surprise!’” Jessica says with a smile. “I had seen them when I was five months pregnant, and I was still hiding it. They were understandably very shocked. I didn’t even tell them I was pregnant before. It was this final moment of ‘we have a baby, she’s here, I can breathe, we can let people know what we were going through.’”

Now Jessica and Adam are doing their best to help as many struggling couples as they can take the first step in their pregnancy journey. Whether a couple had done IVF before or they were never financially able to get to that point, The Hadwin Family Foundation aims to give families the opportunity to feel how Jessica does every day.

IVF worked for them and Maddox’s birth feels more sacred. Jessica knows things could have gone the other way – but they didn’t. The clouds revealed a rainbow, and the sun keeps shining.

“It’s clichéd but motherhood means everything now. And maybe more than if I hadn’t struggled so much,” Jessica Hadwin says, with plenty of emotion behind those words. “Having this grant and seeing the grant recipients and seeing their response – I’m just hoping that they can get to that point, too.”