Want to publicly shame a woman because she didn't have children with you? Then do what Nick Loeb did

Comment pieces, like this one, can be murky: ambiguous, convoluted, with the means to invoke public outrage. They can say one thing, but illustrate what you’re really thinking when you read between the lines. Nick Loeb’s piece on embryonic custody for the New York Times does just that, and the undertones – as well as the overtones – are really troubling.

Loeb, ex-fiancé to Modern Family actress Sofia Vergara, penned the piece, "Our Frozen Embryos Have a Right to Live" to outline his demands for voiding the contract that binds their frozen embryos. Vergara and Loeb separated last year, and he refuses to be tied to a legally binding contract that means the eggs cannot be taken to full term without the two party’s consent. Of course, Vergara has refused, and this is why the case is in court.

He writes about his desire to become a parent, Vergara’s insistence on using a surrogate and their failed attempts to conceive. He details his past experiences of a fractured childhood and a former girlfriend who chose to abort, which affected him as a Catholic who upholds the sanctity of life. He asks, "Does one person's desire to avoid parenthood outweigh another's religious belief in sanctity of life?" – erm, yes. It does.

It’s a piece fudged with pro-life and Catholic sentiment, as he fears for their souls as children of God, and that keeping the embryos frozen is "tantamount to killing". When you take into account the Catholic Church’s stance on IVF, this is incredulous. Anything outside "natural" sexual intercourse isn't just disapproved of – it's forbidden.

This makes me question Loeb's conscience, and whether there is a much more sinister undercurrent to what he says he’s pleading for. Rather than a plea for potential life forms, there is the sense that the piece could be part of a wider project to hurt and distress a successful woman who has moved on in another relationship.

What makes me think this is that throughout the piece, Loeb displays breathtaking hypocrisy. He says he wanted to keep the story private, until the court case was reported. For some reason, this has made him think that he can expose even more of his and his ex-fiance's private life, because there was already so much in the public domain (ie the fact that they were in court over the matter). For him, this means he can talk about how he wanted a child but Vergara wanted a surrogate, how "parenthood was much less urgent for her than it was for me", and how they split up when he gave her an ultimatum on having kids. For someone who wanted to originally keep things "private", Loeb is certainly eager to overshare intimate details about his ex-fiance.

Also, the frozen embryos don’t even have a soul. They aren’t girls. There’s the potential there, but the eggs are a frozen collection of cells sitting in an LA, or New York, or whichever lab, without the need to sleep or eat or breathe or have the same rights as a living person. Because they’re a cluster of DNA. And Vergara has the legal right to keep it that way.

I don’t believe any court would choose to revoke and break the contract. In doing so, it would undermine Vergara’s control over her own body. It may be separate, but it's still hers.

The plea for father’s and men’s rights make my eyes roll so far back in my head they brush my frontal lobe. When the dignity of a woman like Vergara is superseded by the dignity of frozen eggs, that’s sickening. And it’s more than troubling that someone can place their own desire to have children above a woman’s right to choose not to reproduce.

This kind of false equivalence deduces the rights to choose parenthood, reinforces the idea that women are just vessels, unable to decide for themselves. The fact that this was brought to court and broadcast to the public in a tortuous piece feels more like punishment for Vergara than any petty attempt at justice.