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In what may be a new low in bizarre celebrity disputes, millionaire TV star Sofia Vergara and her millionaire ex-fiancé, businessman Nick Loeb, are fighting for custody of their frozen, and microscopic, embryos while Sherri Shepherd is declared mother of a child with former husband, Lamar Sally she no longer wants.
It’s a continuation of cult of celebrity, both women are part of legal shouting matches via court documents, lawyers and in the media. Their failed efforts to make a baby naturally has forced us all to take a look at new fertility laws and repercussions.
Loeb, a Florida businessman who once considered running for the U.S. Senate and who now sells a relish called Onion Crunch, filed a lawsuit last week accusing Vergara of seeking to thaw, and thus destroy, the two female embryos.
Okay… stop… think…
Nick Loeb is fighting for his embryos. Sofia is fighting to “freeze them indefinitely“. Actually her exact words are via her legal counsel are:
Sophia is content to leave the embryos frozen indefinitely as she has no desire to have children with her ex, which should be understandable given the circumstances.”
There is something macabre about this. Children in suspension. They are conceived and placed in halt.
Yesterday, Sherri Shepherd was declared the mother by having consented to bring to term a child conceived by modern technology. We think nothing of using science now to our own benefit to feed our ego when suited. After all, isn’t that what this is all about?
Nick Loeb says he wants to preserve the embryos because he believes life begins at conception. He says that all attempts to resolve the dispute have failed, so he had to file suit. Also, he seems to suggest he alone made the embryos and Vergara had nothing to do with it.
“Every embryo is a life on the journey towards birth. I created these two female embryos with the purpose of taking them to term and not destruction, because I have always dreamed of being a father.-Nick Loeb
Lamar Sally says that he and Sherri Shepherd agreed to have a child via surrogate – using Sally’s sperm and a donor egg after doctors found that Shepherd’s eggs were not viable – within a year of their 2011 wedding Lamar says he thought it was too soon to think about having children and wanted them to just live together for a while. But Sherri was pushing it because she wanted another child and didn’t want to be an old mother.
‘I waited 40 years to get married and have kids. I wanted to do things the right way. Never wanted to have children out of wedlock and only be a weekend or checkbook dad. -Sally insists.”
Do you see something in common thread here?
It is the modern undoing of relationships. It is the selfish entitlement that everyone deserves to be a parent. It is the pick and choose of menus. Bringing about a pregnancy by introducing a cannula through the reproductive tract of a woman and injecting sperm into her body raises concerns about reducing her to a kind of conduit for the purposes of obtaining a child. These actions fail to respect the most personal and intimate aspects of a woman’s relational femininity and her sexuality. She ends up being treated or treating herself as an “object” for the pursuit of ulterior ends. A man also violates his sexuality, as his involvement becomes reduced to “producing a sample,”.The beauty of the marital embrace and the noble desire for the gift of children can make it challenging for us to accept the cross of infertility and childlessness when it arises in marriage.
Now here we are with two high profile women who have basically turned the men they were with into, what we jokingly call “sperm donors”.
I’m not judging or criticizing but I am reflecting on the fact that we have created a horror story. When any relationship goes sour, emotions run high. If there are joint children involved, things tend to get even more heated. The questions arises in our new world is what of children that were created outside of the “traditional”method.
Have these children no protection? What do you do when one parent wants those children and the other does now? Can you see the image? Do you see the mess we have stepped into? We will soon have facilities filled with frozen embryos. At some point we have to hold the mirror up to our self serving ways and be better.
What say you?
