Have you ever done it? Cause I have.

From 13-22 my mom and myself became a placement home for foster kids and we adopted a set of three siblings.

You have no idea what you're talking about. And I am going to give you some cold, hard realities. But I want to do so with the caveat that I love my siblings (not really siblings, I was an adult by the time I met them) and I'd do it all over again. None of this should dissuade someone from taking in a child, or that my experience is the be all, end all of someone's experience.

There are roughly half a million children in the US alone who are in orphanages or don't have permanent homes.

Yes. But have you every actually looked up the kids that are available? Go do it right now. You're going to find three huge commonalities.

• Large sibling groups. Where you might be willing to have child, are you ready to take on two? Five? Because otherwise, you're splitting kids from their siblings. That works in some rare cases, but the majority need to stay together and that's much, much harder to place. If you can take five kids, ages ranging from 17 to 8, you let me know.
• Significant "issues". I put that in quotations because it can run the range of....well, anything. Attachment disorder, developmental delays, will never live on their own as an adult, arson, serious sexual abuse, on and on and on. Yes, a biological child comes with these risks, but in a very different statistical model than "You are absolutely, 100% signing on for being a care-taker for life". And until you've done it, until you've taken a 20 minute shift watching a kid who inappropriately touches their sibling because they are mimicking their own sexual abuse....you don't get to talk to me about the challenges of that. Live through attachment disorder and come talk to me. Change a fifteen year old's diapers, then come talk to me.
• Age. Yes, there are a lot of teenagers looking for parents. But you're not going to sit there and tell me that's the same thing.

But let's move on. Because that list is hardly comprehensive. Most kids in "the system" aren't on that list, and the reason for that is because they are still in the limbo of foster care. And that's a WHOLE other can of worms. Here are some basic reasons why:

• The goal of foster care is to reunify the family. So you can have a child for two months, six months, two years and have to give them up in a heartbeat when the parents get the all clear.
• Even if the parents are deemed unfit to take the children back, then you're facing about two years in court going through the TPR process (termination of parental rights) whereby the child is officially made a ward of the state. This is NOT quick and easy in most cases.
• But let's say the TPR goes through without a lot of drama. The foster family is not given the first bite of the apple. Relatives, on both sides, are sought out to take the kids. Which means an elaborate visitation schedule, planned excursions, weekend visits, all to determine whether the kid can live with said relative. And that relative has to go through all the hoop-jumping in getting certified by the state to take the kid. This can be straight forward (re: there are no relatives or no willing relatives) but it can also be a nightmare in and of itself. Let's say two relatives step up. Let's say five step up. Usually, in a situation where they didn't have the kids in the first place, there are problems here. So you have the social worker, the court, the guardian ad litem, and whomever else is attached to the case essentially trying to suss out who might be a fit parent and that can take...months. Years.
• Add it all together and you could be raising a kid for three or four years only to have them yanked at any moment. For any reason. Because mom finally passed a drug test, because cousin Chloe decided she could take him, because the state couldn't make their case. You can bond deeply and profoundly only to lose that kid at any second.
• You can lose the child at any second. Unless you're drawing from said list, the list I cited above, of kids that have gone through the TPR with no willing relatives (which is basically what that list is) then you're playing the game. And you can sink many, many years into that game and still come out without a kid. Or, worse, you can think you found your kid, you can bond deeply, only to have the rug yanked out from under you at any point. And from that point, your only choice is to start all over with new kids or....to not do that.

There are also realities of biology in play. I am not essentialist in my viewpoint, I believe in nurture, but there are reasons people want a biological child that aren't all vanity and bullshit. There are personality quirks and emotional needs that do not mesh well. This episode of This American Life does a wonderful job of illustrating how much of your selfhood is hard-wired in your biology. That doesn't mean you'll be unloved or unwanted. It just means biology matters in terms of bonding. Clearly, there are instances where this isn't the case and instances in which this is incredibly dramatic. But there are real, biological pre-conditions that help you or hurt you in a family dynamic. You can't ignore that as though it isn't real.

You don't know what you're talking about. You have no sense of the nuance or complications that go into the plan you propose. When all is said and done, fertility treatment is by far the easier option, in my point of view.