That's a gift link, because you've got to read the details. I had a strong opinion based on the headline, but then my sympathy shifted, more than once, as I read the article. The story — the details about this particular woman and man — gets really complicated.
24 મે, 2026
"Over oysters and soft cheeses — things she wouldn’t be able to eat while pregnant — she raised a glass to her 'tribe' and the awesome strength of women."
I'm reading "They Started I.V.F., Then Split. Now Who Gets Custody of the Embryos?
For 47-year-old Erin Millender, this will likely be her last chance to become a mother. Her husband no longer wants to have a child with her" (NYT).
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42 ટિપ્પણીઓ:
Thanks for sharing the link.
"..her 'tribe' and the awesome strength of women.."
i'm NOT sure i understand what sort of transphobic hatred this is?
WHAT on EARTH? does being 'women' have to do with having babies?
REAL Women have penises! To imply otherwise is TRANSPHOBIC!
My heart goes out to both of them. What a mess.
We do a horrible job of educating our young about human reproduction. We teach them how to control it. We don't inspire them with what a miracle it is, and what a blessing it is, and how wonderful it is. I think this story and ones like it are more common that we think.
90% of your eggs are gone by 30. You've lost 99% of them by age 40. Biological reality is a truth that ought to be taught in school. This movie ought to be mandatory in sex education class. Sex is more than just thrills, spills and orgasms.
You should also do a field trip to a hospital and visit the preemies. Boys and girls ought to be taught about baby-making. That's a thing and often it's out of our control.
How old will this child be when they know they were the result of a string of bad decisions?
I understood my parents meeting in the first place was the result of a murder (of my own grandfather) and the dropping of the atomic bomb before they even met, and I found it really didn't affect me at all, in the end.
I also find that this woman makes me want to put on my track shoes and run as far away as I can from her. Her child is likely to feel the same way at some point, he added unkindly. Her life doesn't leave a lot of room for other people.
It isn’t complicated if you start with the premise that IVF is a moral abomination and society ought not embrace it. It is a Pandora’s box from which all sorts of evil emanates, this case being just one.
Strong desire is there, although desire for parenthood seems to be far down the list of strong desires, way below a desire to prevail in interpersonal issues.
Millender “begged Rubin to change his mind”.
I think it far more likely that Millender ordered Rubin to change his mind. What a self-absorbed, delusional scold. Rubin escaped with his life.
A splooge stooge acting as if he has any say in whether he reproduces or not? Outrageous!
Sounds like a wonderful relationship from the get-go: "When he started dragging his feet about moving in, then about proposing, Millender issued clear ultimatums."
I would like to hear an update after baby is born. My bet is that ex-hubby steps in as the father and does an excellent job.
What Saint Croix said at 8:12.
Plus this: we've spent decades as a society, mocking the classic family structure- a man and a woman having children. To the point that in some demographics, upwards of 75% of children are born to a single mother. And data shows they are behind the 8 ball from birth. If they are born to a single parent in a poorer neighborhood with bad schools, they are screwed at birth.
In addition, we've celebrated abortion. And we've celebrated women who pursue their career ("A high-powered lawyer dressed for a big board meeting...") over slowing that down to create a one of a kind family. Children who may be your single greatest achievement. Add to that we've written men out of our system economically by removing them from our education system. Don't believe me? Just check out graduation rates in high school and college.
I've seen and know too many middle aged, professionally successful, single women who have this permanent sadness embedded in their faces, like a tattoo.
We let our priorities get twisted.
SpaceCityGirl wrote: "My bet is that ex-hubby steps in as the father and does an excellent job."
My bet is that Mommy Dearest files for sole custody and a no-contact restraining order. Five bucks?
Most of the men who will be good, supportive, husbands and good fathers will be already married by their early thirties. A smart, pretty woman who thinks that guys who are good husband material will still hanging around after age 35, just desperate to meet her and sweep her off her feet might be intelligent, but she isn’t wise.
Women also underestimate how much a child takes out of a parent — both parents, but children instinctively turn to mommy. Not fair to either parent, but it is what it is.
Millander comes off as a self-absorbed GirlBoss type. The further along I read on the article, the less and less empathy I have for her. There's a sense that she viewed Rubin as breeding stock. He eventually picked that up as well and wanted out.
And to think that someday decades from now the child will read this article and learn that they were a creation of dysfunction, not love.
“Her husband no longer wants to have a child with her.” It’s not relevant to her situation but it reminded me that abortion is largely about women having unprotected sex with men they don’t want to have a child with.
Buckle up - I have a lot of thoughts, and as we know, even when I only have a single thought, I express it at considerable length.
Her life doesn't leave a lot of room for other people.
That's how I read it too, maybe with a hint of mitigation.
This must have been a complicated story to research: the timing and the he-said/she-said element are so critical. I'm actually surprised that the (apparently female) reporter presented the husband's side as sympathetically as she did, and the wife as pretty much a narcissist.
My question is why. She - the wife - is driven, high-powered, high-income, Catholic but pro-(right to)abortion, intelligent and realistic (at least as regards her odds, all along, of marriage and then of pregnancy). She married an HVAC guy after telling her friends that she was looking for someone who could keep up with her intellectually, and nothing in the piece suggests that she ever threw his lack of Ivy cred in his face, so she has a sufficiently flexible mind to recognize that intelligence does not necessarily reside in diplomas. But in the thick of it, she couldn't turn her attention outward, to see that she was (according to the husband's affidavit, at least) destroying a relationship that was going to be - if not 100% required - very very important to her success as a "geriatric mother" (any mother over 35, for the uninitiated).
I can say that I've never been as selfish, to be frank, as I was during my first pregnancy. It's a time of intense inward focus. Everything else that doesn't center on that developing life is colorless, boring, often actively annoying. One doesn't have the opportunity to indulge those feelings once there's already an extant child, so in subsequent pregnancies I was a better person. Some of it is the hormones, I'm sure, but some (I think) is simply the free-floating awareness that what you're doing, without any real effort on your part, is unbelievably complex and miraculous, even though it happens all the time. Participating so directly in growing a human is heady.
So - was at least some of her irrational, cruelly direct, and hurtful behavior toward her husband the result of the hormones she'd been pumped full of throughout the IVF process? I don't think it can all be laid on that doorstep - she comes across as... let's say "single-minded" throughout her life.
An unanswered question is why she wants a baby so passionately. I did too, as a girl and young woman, and maybe that desire would only have grown if I'd had difficulty. But I like to think that by age 47, I would have examined my feelings carefully and, if appearing in a story like this one and deciding as she did to go forward on my own, have insisted on making my reasons explicit. This way, it almost seems as if she's checking a box: Ivy League degree - check. Successful career - check. Baby - ...?
Who should get the embryos? Geez. In theory I prefer the Arizona decision - whoever intends to help them grow to maturity as a baby. But what man is going to find another partner and convince her to bear his first wife's baby rather than trying for her own? Or is he going to pay for a surrogate and then explain that to a second partner?
Orson Scott Card addressed this issue - not custody, but what to do with "unused" embryos - in one of his Ender books. As an observant LDS member, his position is strongly pro-life and probably not practical, but for me it has emotional appeal: implant every one of them, in women who want babies.
Anyone who would cooperate with a journalist about something like that ought to get their head examined.
I don't know who to side with on this one. Seems they both made a lot of bad decisions. Hope the kid doesn't suffer for it.
He wants out, but his child support payments won't have that option.
At least the kid is always going to know: He/She doesn't come first in mumsy & daddy's eyes.
The way I read this story:
1. Judge Ciccotto - one hell of a smart judge. Knew her decision would be appealed but gave Erin a window to get the job done if that’s what she wanted.
2. All part of the crazy courtship/mating ritual. Same as it ever was.
3. Best wishes to the parents. The kid will be fine. Luckier than the 95% other babies born in this crazy world.
This is a perfect rejoinder to the Kevin O'leary post above. An Ivy League lawyer.
She got paid huge amounts of money to be a net negative to societal wealth.
This woman got this advice:
"For Millender, the clock did not start to tick until she turned 35.
She’d settled on that age in her mid-20s as what she called a “drop-dead date” for finding a husband. Entering the work force with an Ivy League degree, she’d decided to take the advice of her mother, who had started a family right out of school. “Don’t get married young,” her mom had always said. “Men can come later.”
She is a dumb and gullible person. She could have contributed to society by having kids.
Instead we take mediocrities like this and give them law degrees and stick them in an air conditioned office and let them wreak havoc on our society. We give them a solid 6 figure salary to do it.
Then we wonder why everything is so expensive.
So she wanted a guy who "could keep up with her intellectually", but she isn't smart enough to know that women's fertility starts to drop off a cliff at age 35?
Jamie said...
She married an HVAC guy after telling her friends that she was looking for someone who could keep up with her intellectually, and nothing in the piece suggests that she ever threw his lack of Ivy cred in his face, so she has a sufficiently flexible mind to recognize that intelligence does not necessarily reside in diplomas.
The problem starts when you grant that she is smarter than an HVAC tech.
She is not. She is clearly a stupid person who makes bad decisions. Getting a Law degree from an Ivy league school does not make you smart. It makes you credentialed.
The HVAC tech she married was a positive contributor to society and should be given more social status. He is more intelligent than she is and makes better decisions.
A smart woman would have realized she would be happier with a husband and 3-5 kids than she is with a law degree from an ivy league school 20 year law career suing companies that don't DEI enough and a narcissism problem.
47? Does this woman have any idea how long you are legally required to feed, clothe and house a child? Till she's 65. So even success will bring another NY Times article in 15 years about all the old parents tied down with babies they had late in life.
“ Boys and girls ought to be taught about baby-making”
Yea baby they call me the bed slat breaker, they call me
the baby maker!
I didn’t read the whole article—it’s long—but I read far enough to lose all sympathy for her. She’s is portrayed as being someone with a checklist, and husband and baby were just boxes to check off. Everyone around her merely a tool for her own fulfillment.
She was set up for failure by her own mother, who told her to wait. Career first, baby later. Now she’s paying the price for listening to that horrible advice.
Maybe she’ll be a good mom. After all, “good mom” is probably on her checklist. At least I hope it is; for her child’s sake.
“I’m proud to say I come here as a woman of many virtues,” Millender said as she delivered her vows on the yacht
That was one of her vows!?
3. Best wishes to the parents. The kid will be fine. Luckier than the 95% other babies born in this crazy world.
Once I got to the part where it said she was pregnant, all I could think was "that poor baby!". Sure, that child will not go hungry or want for material things, but it will hear (with many repetitions) what she had to go through to have it and how its father didn't want it to exist. She will manage that child's future the way she tried to manage hers with as little disregard for its wants as she had for her husband's.
I am curious how many meetings of other couples she accidentally engineered with her “Go find the prettiest girl in the store and introduce yourself” Craigslist ad.
That was one of her vows!?
No, a threat, because she finished that thought with "patience isn't one of them".
Quite a long odyssey. It's hard to believe anyone would willingly give a reporter that much information.
"She wanted to engineer the kind of meet-cute you would see in a rom-com. To find a handsome stranger who would sidle up to her shopping cart, then bewitch her with his intellect and wit."
One of many mistakes. She lives in a fantasy world.
Best wishes to the parents. The kid will be fine. Luckier than the 95% other babies born in this crazy world.
I don’t agree. The kid will grow up knowing that he or she was never really loved. The child is just a check mark on a to-do list
Eva Marie wrote: "Judge Ciccotto - one hell of a smart judge. Knew her decision would be appealed but gave Erin a window to get the job done if that’s what she wanted."
'Smart' enough to pave a get-around for one side of a case before her. To reduce the central point of contention to a nullity. To completely screw over the husband. Yeah. 'Smart.'
Eva Marie said...
The way I read this story:
1. Judge Ciccotto - one hell of a smart judge. Knew her decision would be appealed but gave Erin a window to get the job done if that’s what she wanted.
2. All part of the crazy courtship/mating ritual. Same as it ever was.
3. Best wishes to the parents. The kid will be fine. Luckier than the 95% other babies born in this crazy world.
...
College has been bad for women.
People should go look up the debates that the anti-suffragettes had during the women's suffrage movement.
Women did themselves no favors in their quest for "equality" and they tore society apart in their quest.
Now we will have another kid growing up with no father and a narcissistic aged out harem girl for a mother.
These stories remind me of the trashier women's magazines of the early 60's with "my sister had an affair with my husband", "I don't know the father of my baby" type headlines. I don't recall ever seeing this kind of story in my parents' copy of Sunday Times.
“By the time they had sex a few months later, Millender had identified Rubin as a man she [would infect with her sexually transmitted disease…] So when the moment came to reach for a condom, she said, she told him he could skip that step.”
Stooges, the two of them.
“‘Smart' enough to pave a get-around for one side of a case before her. To reduce the central point of contention to a nullity.”
Exactly.
“To completely screw over the husband.”
That was a bonus.
Rarely can a judge get that much satisfaction out of a case.
Achilles: “ narcissistic aged out harem girl”
That was Narcissistic Aged-Out Harem Girls, with “Narcissistic Aged-Out Harem Girls, from the album Narcissistic Aged-Out Harem Girls. On Rock 101, with me John Mosby taking you into the 3 o’clock hour….CC, JSM
All's fair in lust and abortion. Welcome to the modern family and sensibilities.
Not sounding SO Catholic here:
https://www.smashingtheglass.com/jewish-bride-spotlight-erin-millender/
@Tattycoram: aww . . . they’ll make wonderful parents.
Secular seance strikes out. Use the farce.
He looks like a nice Jewish guy.
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