WHEN TERESA BARBOSA MAR-ried her husband Michael, children were always part of the plan. The couple was delighted when she became pregnant a few years later, but their joy soon turned to despair. “As we prepped for this new chapter, a fire destroyed our home,” she told Newsweek. “In the ashes of our home, we learned that my pregnancy was terminating. Everything was literally crumbling around us.”
Over the next decade, the couple drained their life savings paying for round after round of in vitro fertilization (IVF) treatments that were unsuccessful. “We were broken emotionally and financially,” she says.
In 2019, the couple adopted Sofia, now 5, and Barbosa founded the nonprofit Gift of Parenthood to help others in dire need—many of them women of color
