Sofia Vergara’s ex-fiance Nick Loeb has offered some context for why he’s suing the “Modern Family” star for custody of two embryos the couple had created in 2013 -- and in doing so he has shed some light on the end of their relationship.

“I take the responsibility and obligation of being a parent very seriously,” Loeb said in a New York Times opinion piece Thursday. “This is not just about saving lives; it is also about being pro-parent.”

The case went public a couple of weeks ago after InTouch magazine got hold of Loeb’s pseudonymous lawsuit, which was first brought last August in the wake of the couple’s breakup, then refiled April 1 after he hired a new attorney.

Loeb said in his essay that he’d begun to push for children as soon as they got engaged, and that Vergara had insisted on using a surrogate. The first embryo created via in-vitro fertilization didn’t take in the surrogate, and she miscarried the second.


“A year later, we tried again, creating two more embryos, both female. But as we began to discuss other potential surrogates, it became clear once more that parenthood was much less urgent for her than it was for me,” he wrote. “We had been together for over four years. As I was coming on 40, I gave her an ultimatum. When she refused, we split up.”

That’s not how Vergara explained the breakup in 2014. She said work conflicts were keeping them from spending time together and that the relationship wasn’t fun anymore.

Loeb said that a few months after they ended it, he asked her for the embryos, offering to take all responsibility -- parental and financial -- if she didn’t want to share custody of “our girls” and was OK being declared an egg donor. “She has refused,” he said.

In his piece, Loeb mentioned a lifetime of wanting to be a father, a girlfriend who’d had an abortion without consulting him, a mother he barely knew, the religious influence of his Catholic nanny and the recent death of his mother as motivating factors. He said he’s asking that an agreement they’d signed requiring both his and her permission to bring the embryos to term be voided, as it did not, as required by California law, detail what would happen to the embryos if he and Vergara split up.


She went public about freezing her eggs in a Vogue interview in early 2013, when she was 40 and she and Loeb were engaged. (He’d proposed the previous summer.)

“They want to get as many eggs as they can because usually you produce them but they’re not good,” she told the magazine. “They have to be perfect, perfect, perfect ones. My boyfriend is 37, younger than me, never had kids. So.”

Vergara is now engaged to actor Joe Manganiello.

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