Sofia Vergara's frozen embryos are now a matter of public knowledge - and that can only be a bad thing

It could only happen in Hollywood. Sofia Vergara, the glamorous Colombian-American star of Modern Family, is embroiled in a very modern family dispute of her own. It involves her ex-partner, the millionaire businessman Nick Loeb, the fate of the embryos they froze together and a first-person opinion piece in The New York Times. The rich and famous do break-ups differently, you see.

In brief: in 2013 the couple decided to try for a child through IVF, using her eggs, his sperm and, apparently at Vergara’s insistence, a surrogate. Two attempts failed, so a year later they tried again, creating two more embryos. Then, in May last year, they split up. Vergara is now engaged to fellow actor Joe Manganiello and is, according to her lawyer, “content to leave the embryos frozen indefinitely as she has no desire to have children with her ex”.

Loeb has no desire to have children with his ex either, but he does want to have children. And as he wrote in The New York Times this week: “That doesn’t mean I should let the two lives I have already created be destroyed or sit in a freezer until the end of time.” He is now suing for custody of the two embryos.

It is a drama more fitting to a Colombian telenovela than Modern Family, though one can well imagine the sitcom’s brilliant team of writers going to town on a frozen embryo storyline. Vergara’s impulsive Gloria would likely veer from fierce repulsion to fierce adoration of her little Petri dish; Phil would make an inappropriate joke about its looks; Cam would almost certainly cry into it; Manny would knit it a cashmere babygro and so on. It is the great joy of the comedy that it demonstrates, week in, week out, with a beautiful ratio of risqué gags to schmaltz, that there is no such thing as a “traditional” family unit any more.

This new imbroglio isn’t a script, though; it is real life. And like it or not, where American stars go, others eventually, inevitably follow. How this case – however eccentric it seems – plays out will have implications in the future for couples making decisions about IVF. It is bizarre that the public should know of the existence of frozen embryos of a couple it has never met, though it is the horribly logical conclusion of our see-all, tell-all obsession with celebrity. Nothing is off limits – not their red carpet poses, nor their medical records.

Loeb’s decision to write about his and Vergara’s private, reproductive matters in a quality newspaper – a piece surely not accidentally timed to coincide with premiere of his ex’s new movie – is one he will likely live to regret. Certainly, should he ever have the children he so longs for, whether Vergara’s or not, he will have a hard time explaining it to them. His writing is emotive, sensational in places. Keeping the embryos frozen indefinitely is, he says, “tantamount to killing them”. He lays out his Catholic faith and “a parent’s right to protect the life of his or her unborn child”. Vergara has yet to speak for herself.

The problem for Loeb is that this is not a battle of beliefs, of pro-choice vs pro-life; it is a wrangle over a contract. Both Loeb and Vergara signed a form stating that any embryos created could be brought to term only with the consent of both parties. That form did not state what would happen if the couple split up, says Loeb, therefore it should be voided.

This is a specious argument: if the couple were still together and one of them did not want to have a baby, Loeb would be in the same position as he is now. It also conveniently glosses over the fact that Loeb has other options open to him – he could have a child by another partner, or by another egg donor. This is not his last chance.

Clearly, medical technology is already outstripping the law in this area. With more child-bearing options come more complex problems. The question is who owns an embryo if it is created outside a body, though one does not need a legal brain to understand that if two people make an embryo, its fate should lie in the hands of both. I doubt the answer can be found in tell-all exposés in a newspaper. Still, I’m sure somebody, somewhere in LA is already pitching the movie script, so I doubt we’ve heard the end of it yet.