Religious Bullies

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India Knight hits the nail on the head with this article from The Sunday Times in which she argues that the wealthy, religious bully (also known as Nick Loeb) should try having a baby by the traditional method of having sex with a woman he likes and - more importantly - who likes him. 

So, this is a modern family — forcing your ex to have an IVF child

Nick Loeb wants to bring to term two frozen embryos created with his former fianceé, Sofia Vergara (Jeff Kravitz)

By India Knight - The Sunday Times

Who on earth would want to have a baby with their ex? It’s the most peculiar concept imaginable. And yet this is the position that the actress Sofia Vergara, who plays Gloria in Modern Family, currently finds herself in. It isn’t just that her former fiancé, Nick Loeb, wants to have a baby with her — it’s that he technically could and won’t take no for answer.

The pair were together for four years. Vergara, 42, has a grown-up son already. In 2013, Loeb and Vergara tried for a child through IVF, using her eggs, his sperm and a surrogate. Two attempts failed. They tried again a year later, creating two female embryos, but split up when, according to Loeb, it became clear that “parenthood was much less urgent for her than it was for me”.

These two embryos have remained frozen; and Loeb wants to activate them, even though Vergara, who is now engaged to somebody else, does not. “She has no desire to have children with her ex, which should be understandable given the circumstances,” her lawyer said last week.

“In my view, keeping them frozen for ever is tantamount to killing them,” Loeb wrote in The New York Times. (What’s freezing them for two years tantamount to? A light duffing-up? Surely you’re either fine with freezing embryos or you’re not.)

Loeb is bringing a legal action in California to “protect” the two embryos. He and Vergara previously signed a form saying that any embryos of theirs could only be brought to term with the consent of both parties but “the form did not state, as California law requires, what would happen if we separated. I am asking to have it voided,” said Loeb, who is a very rich businessman.

Ethical nightmare aside — and it’s a very American ethical nightmare to do with a cavalier, big-business approach to IVF — surely anyone’s sympathies must lie with Vergara. To my mind, forcing a woman into motherhood is a piece of deeply creepy emotional abuse.

Loeb may be genuine when he expresses anguish about the fate of these embryos (Vergara has said she would like them to remain frozen indefinitely), but to me this story has a nasty and sadistic undercurrent. She left him, which he presumably wasn’t thrilled about. She is the highest-paid actress on American television, so he couldn’t take the traditional route of the enraged male dumpee and screw her over financially. He could do much better, though: he could force his ex to have a child with him.

The more you think about it, the more it becomes almost gothically horrible — much like Loeb’s childhood: his parents divorced when he was one, his mother vanished from his life for nine years and went on to kill her third husband and herself when Loeb was 20.

In his article last week, Loeb wrote of his desire to have “the type of family based on the images one might see in a Norman Rockwell painting” — Rockwell being the chronicler of white-bread, small-town America in the 1940s and 1950s. It’s like a British man saying he felt an urgent need to start a family based on the mental images he got from reading Enid Blyton. It does not gladden the heart.

Loeb is 39. He should have a baby using the traditional method of sex with a woman he likes and who likes him.

What this strange, upsetting story shows is that there are no magical solutions to the question of having children. You can’t breezily say, “Oh, I’ll just have IVF”, or, “Oh, I’ll just freeze my eggs”, or, “I’ll just find a sperm donor”, as though these things were simple, easy and came with a guarantee of success.

Some people are forced to swim in these waters, and some people have wonderful results, and I am delighted for them. But the water is not crystal-clear and its depths can be dark. We should never forget that the best way of having children is at a biologically appropriate age with someone you love. Loeb is trying to have a baby out of hate, and that’s a disaster.

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