Matt C. Abbott
Latest on embryo suit involving Hollywood celebrity Sofía Vergara
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By Matt C. Abbott
November 18, 2016

From Page Six (Nov. 14):
    The battle over Sofía Vergara's frozen embryos with ex-fiancé Nick Loeb has taken a shocking turn. The actress is demanding Loeb reveal the names of two former girlfriends who underwent abortions around 20 years ago.

    A California judge upheld Vergara's request that Loeb, 41, name the women who terminated their pregnancies many years ago. A horrified Loeb appealed the decision, but the Court of Appeals backed Vergara....

    Loeb filed a lawsuit in 2015 to protect, and bring to term, the two female embryos he created with Vergara ... Vergara and Loeb had planned to use a surrogate but did not agree on what would happen if they split. Loeb ... intends to raise the children himself without any parental or financial help from Vergara....
This is an unfortunate development. Mr. Loeb is doing the right thing by trying to save the embryos from destruction; but now he's being forced by the courts to violate others' privacy and, to use a term from Catholic moral theology, commit the sin of detraction by revealing the names of the post-abortive women from his past.

It's legal hardball on the part of Vergara's counsel, but still repugnant.

In an email to me, Mr. Loeb wrote:

"Could you imagine if you had moved on with your life, gotten married, had children and kept this a secret from your family – then, all of a sudden, 15 years later, you're made to reveal your abortion to the world? Maybe your parents never knew; maybe your husband never knew, nor your children."

Abram Moore, counsel for Mr. Loeb, wrote in an email to me:

"Ms. Vergara is attempting to force Nick to disclose the names of his former girlfriends who had abortions decades ago. As Nick set forth in his New York Times editorial, his ex-girlfriend's abortion caused him considerable duress after-the-fact, and contributed to the development of his firm pro-life beliefs.

"Ms. Vergara hopes to subpoena these women and force them to sit for depositions, where they will be grilled by her attorney about the reproductive decisions they made years ago. Whether one agrees with those decisions or not, we view this as a massive intrusion into their privacy for no reason.

"Her counsel has argued that, if these women were to testify that Nick did not object at the time, then he must not really be pro-life today. We have argued that these women should be left alone and that their testimony is entirely irrelevant to Nick's current beliefs, which arose largely after and because of his relationships with these women."

© Matt C. Abbott

 

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Matt C. Abbott

Matt C. Abbott is a Catholic commentator with a Bachelor of Arts degree in communication, media, and theatre from Northeastern Illinois University. He also has an Associate in Applied Science degree in business management from Triton College. Abbott has been interviewed on HLN, MSNBC, Bill Martinez Live, WOSU Radio in Ohio, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel's 2019 ‘Unsolved’ podcast about the unsolved murder of Father Alfred Kunz, Alex Shuman's 'Smoke Screen: Fake Priest' podcast, WLS-TV (ABC) in Chicago, WMTV (NBC) and WISC-TV (CBS) in Madison, Wisconsin. He’s been quoted in The New York Times, the Chicago Tribune and other media outlets. He’s mentioned in the 2020 Report on the Holy See's Institutional Knowledge and Decision-Making Related to Former Cardinal Theodore Edgar McCarrick (1930 to 2017), which can be found on the Vatican's website. He can be reached at mattcabbott@gmail.com.

(Note: I welcome and appreciate thoughtful feedback. Insults will be ignored. Only in very select cases will I honor a request to have a telephone conversation about a topic in my column. Email is much preferred. God bless you and please keep me in your prayers!)

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