More women are waiting longer to have children and egg freezing is quite popular amongst American women. Sofía Vergara, 43, was once engaged to Nick Loeb and they froze their embryos together. The couple broke up and she married Joe Manganiello and of course she has no interest in having children with Loeb, which is why the ex-couple is undergoing a legal battle to determine what’s going to happen to the frozen embryos.
LIKE DailyVitamina.com on Facebook! Get Your Daily Vitamin…FOR LIFE!
This public legal battle is setting the example for the thousands of women interested in freezing their embryos. Luckily you don’t have to much of the legal leg work, since you are asked to sign consent forms at the clinic where you’re getting your embryos frozen. They will ask how long you want the embryos to be stored, what happens if your partner dies or can’t make decisions by yourself, whether you can donate them, and any other specific requests.
In most cases embryos are stored for 10 years, which is why Loeb has been battling the actress (he’s running out of time). They broke up in May 2014 and he filed suit in August 2015. The ex-couple created several frozen embryos together and signed an agreement stating that “mutual consent” would be needed to bring them to term.
Sofía is now married and she has no interest in the frozen embryos and even accuses Loeb of trying to use the suit as an opportunity to promote himself. “More than a mother, [a child] needs a loving relationship of parents that you know, get along, that don’t hate each other,” she says.
“I think the misconception is that people don’t know the difference between an embryo and an egg. A lot of people think I’m trying to steal her eggs and they don’t realize that an embryo is half mine—half my DNA and half her DNA. It’s actually a human being,” explains Loeb in a recent interview.
Finally she undergoes a transvaginal ultrasound, where the eggs get removed through a needle passed through the vaginal wall, before the embryos are frozen using liquid nitrogen. Once the patient decides to harvest them, they are thawed and fertilized with the injection of a single sperm and passed through the uterus as embryos. The average cost of egg freezing in the U.S. is $10,000 and the success rate is about 24%
It will be interesting to see what happens in the court room, Loeb explains that they’ve already been through depositions and are now waiting for a court date to be set, which should be sometime this summer.