SEATTLE — Ahead of National Infertility Awareness Week (April 24-30), KING 5’s Jessica Janner Castro spoke to Erin Quick, founder of Pairtree.
Pairtree is a Seattle tech company meant to modernize the adoption process.
In this week’s episode of Mindful Headlines, Quick talks about her own fertility struggles before she adopted her two kids through “self-matching” and how others can do the same.
“We went through years and thousands of dollars of treatments. After our 3rd miscarriage we just felt broken: financially, physically and emotionally broken. We always said we wanted to adopt. So, when we started to explore adoption, we were blown away at how expensive it was, the processes felt old, and how long the timelines were. Luckily, we had some friends tell us about self-matching (we call it self-navigating) where you build your own team,” Quick said.
Quick and her husband were able to hire their own lawyer and social worker and connect with potential birth families on their own. After navigating the process themselves, Quick felt a responsibility to other families to help them figure out their own adoption journeys.
"It was kind of always in my head when we were going through the first adoption that, this is really complicated and it's such an important journey that families spend so much time concentrating on the logistics of getting through the hoops of adoption, versus the actual experience which is, you know how do you educate yourself as an adoptive parent on all the variables in adoption, how are you concentrating on building a relationship with the birth family or embryo donor family, and so it was like, it felt out of whack in terms of where the emphasis was," Quick said.
Quick, who lives on Bainbridge Island with her family, launched the digital adoption platform in 2020.
PairTree now has nearly 4 thousand families and more than 400 expectant mothers registered. Quick has helped dozens of families in Western Washington adopt a child.
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