Nazima Khan, 34, and Riyad Khan, 35, married young in the hopes of starting a family early. Born and raised in Toronto to South Asian parents, Nazima works as a registered nurse in a labour and delivery ward and Riyad works as a teacher. They are the proud parents of three young children. There is very little that distinguishes them from your average Muslim Canadian professional family. Except that they adopted their children from the Children’s Aid Society (CAS).
The Khans recently shared their story at a seminar on Islam and Adoption organized by Amal Fertility, a support group for Muslims struggling with infertility based in Toronto, in the hopes of breaking the taboo around open discussion of infertility in the community and encouraging more Muslim families to consider adopting as there are many Muslim children currently looking for homes in Canada.
Why have you chosen to speak so openly about infertility and adoption in the Muslim community?
Nazima Khan: Our infertility was a real private part of our life. But we are trying to change that now because infertility affects many, many couples and it is not something to be ashamed about. A lot of people are going through it so let’s reach out and let’s support each other and discover all the resources and support networks out there. We got married young, at 21, and we both knew that we wanted kids at a young age. Unfortunately, things didn’t work out that way. We struggled with infertility pretty much a year after our marriage. I have endometriosis. So we were made aware quite early that it would be very difficult for us to conceive naturally. We did try reproductive assistance but unfortunately those attempts failed.
Why did you consider adopting?
Riyad Khan: Personally, for me, adoption wasn’t something I was aware of growing up. I didn’t have any family members who were adopted. It took a while for me to come around to the idea of adoption because I was never exposed to it. Once we made the decision to explore adoption we were both fully on board and we started the process at that time.
Nazima Khan: We decided to adopt seven years into our marriage because we both wanted a family so we knew we would have to find a different method of achieving our dream. Because adoption was completely new to us we had to do a lot of research. We looked into international adoption, private adoption, and local adoption....For More details Read>>>>>>>
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