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.
In most cases, women freeze their eggs during their 20s and 30s and the process isn’t quite that easy and yes it’s painful. It is a four to six week process, which includes hormone-blocking pills that suspend the natural production of eggs, followed by 2 weeks of hormone injections. Then, a day and a half before they extract the eggs, the patient is given a trigger shot, which prepares the eggs for maturing.
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.
