Is this ‘Modern Family’ Star Killing Her Children?
Sophia Vergara and businessman Nick Loeb were engaged when they froze fertilized embryos to have children later in life.
Now, though, the two have split, and he has filed a lawsuit to unfreeze them and raise the children as his own, but she won’t grant custody.
To Loeb—and anyone who believes life begins at conception—it’s tantamount to killing them.
“When we create embryos for the purpose of life, should we not define them as life, rather than as property?” Loeb writes in an op-ed for the New York Times. “Does one person’s desire to avoid biological parenthood (free of any legal obligations) outweigh another’s religious beliefs in the sanctity of life and desire to be a parent?”
The two embryos are both little girls, which means they’ve grown to the point to identify gender. Loeb says he wants to raise them without any help from Vergara, but still, she refuses to give consent.
In previous cases, a judge awarded a woman her fertilized embryos from an ex because “Karla’s desire to have a biological child in the face of the impossibility of having one without using the embryos outweighs Jacob’s privacy concerns, which are now moot.”
Vergara and Loeb’s case is heavily watched—both for its players and the precedent it will set about when life begins.
Technology and innovations over the years has allowed for couples to redefine family planning, and research shows there are more than 60,000 cryogenically frozen embryos in the United States.
And according to PBS, costs of freezing have dropped dramatically in the last few years—from $13,000 to $4,000.
With the advancements come the questions of when life begins—at conception, fertilization, growth or birth?
Loeb believes his little girls are already children, and even if he were to meet and marry someone in the next few years, it wouldn’t change his convictions, he told the Today show.
He’s not the only one facing moral convictions.
“The presence of embryos for whom … they feel a certain undefined moral responsibility presents tens of thousands of Americans with a dilemma for which nothing—nothing—has prepared them,” Liza Mundy writes in a Mother Jones article.
Is there a solution or a compromise to be found? The courts will decide as they evaluate Loeb’s lawsuit.
What do you think about the case? Sound off!
