What are the key takeaways from this The Daily (NYT) episode?

Key insights include: **IVF Legal Vacuum:** Two-thirds of U.S. states have no appellate court precedent governing embryo custody disputes after couples separate. This leaves individual lower-court judges with wide discretion, producing inconsistent rulings state by state. Couples undergoing IVF should consult a reproductive attorney before treatment to understand their state's specific legal exposure and document mutual intent clearly.; **Contract Gaps in IVF Agreements:** Standard IVF clinic contracts typically offer only three disposition options at separation — embryo destruction, donation to research, or transfer to one party — but do not require couples to specify which party receives the embryos. Millinder and Rubin selected "one party" without naming who, creating the legal ambiguity that drove their court case.; **Consent Revocation Risk:** Either partner in an IVF process can unilaterally contact the fertility clinic and revoke consent for embryo transfers without notifying the other party. Rubin did exactly this, withdrawing consent before informing Millinder. Couples should negotiate and document irrevocable consent terms with legal counsel before beginning IVF to prevent unilateral withdrawal mid-process.

What did Caroline Kitchener discuss on The Daily (NYT)?

NYT reporter Caroline Kitchener chronicles the legal battle between Erin Millinder, 47, and her estranged husband Adam Rubin over two IVF embryos after their divorce. The case exposes a nationwide legal vacuum around embryo custody, with two-thirds of U.S. states lacking appellate precedent on who controls frozen embryos when couples separate. Key topics include: **IVF Legal Vacuum:** Two-thirds of U.S. states have no appellate court precedent governing embryo custody disputes after couples separate. This leaves individual lower-court judges with wide discretion, producing inconsistent rulings state by state. Couples undergoing IVF should consult a reproductive attorney before treatment to understand their state's specific legal exposure and document mutual intent clearly.; **Contract Gaps in IVF Agreements:** Standard IVF clinic contracts typically offer only three disposition options at separation — embryo destruction, donation to research, or transfer to one party — but do not require couples to specify which party receives the embryos. Millinder and Rubin selected "one party" without naming who, creating the legal ambiguity that drove their court case..

How long is this episode of The Daily (NYT)?

This episode is 43 minutes long. SignalCast provides an AI-generated summary so you can get the key insights in about 3 minutes.

The Daily (NYT)

A Couple Breaks Up. Who Gets Custody of Their Embryos?

September 10, 2026

43 min episode · 2 min read

Caroline Kitchener

Episode

43 min

Read time

2 min

Topics

Productivity, Relationships, Product & Tech Trends

AI-Generated Summary

Published Sep 10, 2026

Key Takeaways

✓IVF Legal Vacuum: Two-thirds of U.S. states have no appellate court precedent governing embryo custody disputes after couples separate. This leaves individual lower-court judges with wide discretion, producing inconsistent rulings state by state. Couples undergoing IVF should consult a reproductive attorney before treatment to understand their state's specific legal exposure and document mutual intent clearly.
✓Contract Gaps in IVF Agreements: Standard IVF clinic contracts typically offer only three disposition options at separation — embryo destruction, donation to research, or transfer to one party — but do not require couples to specify which party receives the embryos. Millinder and Rubin selected "one party" without naming who, creating the legal ambiguity that drove their court case.
✓Consent Revocation Risk: Either partner in an IVF process can unilaterally contact the fertility clinic and revoke consent for embryo transfers without notifying the other party. Rubin did exactly this, withdrawing consent before informing Millinder. Couples should negotiate and document irrevocable consent terms with legal counsel before beginning IVF to prevent unilateral withdrawal mid-process.
✓Timing and Biological Urgency as Legal Arguments: Millinder's legal team successfully argued at the lower court level that her age, infertility diagnosis, and the embryos representing her last viable path to biological parenthood outweighed Rubin's objection. Courts in embryo disputes increasingly weigh one party's irreversible biological window against the other's desire to avoid parenthood when no clear contract exists.
✓Legislative vs. Judicial Approaches: Arizona passed the first state embryo custody law in 2018, directing courts to award embryos to whichever party intends to use them for reproduction. Michigan's Supreme Court declined to rule on a similar case in 2024, deferring to the legislature. Individuals in states without legislation face greater legal uncertainty and should monitor pending state-level reproductive law developments.

What It Covers

NYT reporter Caroline Kitchener chronicles the legal battle between Erin Millinder, 47, and her estranged husband Adam Rubin over two IVF embryos after their divorce. The case exposes a nationwide legal vacuum around embryo custody, with two-thirds of U.S. states lacking appellate precedent on who controls frozen embryos when couples separate.

Key Questions Answered

•IVF Legal Vacuum: Two-thirds of U.S. states have no appellate court precedent governing embryo custody disputes after couples separate. This leaves individual lower-court judges with wide discretion, producing inconsistent rulings state by state. Couples undergoing IVF should consult a reproductive attorney before treatment to understand their state's specific legal exposure and document mutual intent clearly.
•Contract Gaps in IVF Agreements: Standard IVF clinic contracts typically offer only three disposition options at separation — embryo destruction, donation to research, or transfer to one party — but do not require couples to specify which party receives the embryos. Millinder and Rubin selected "one party" without naming who, creating the legal ambiguity that drove their court case.
•Consent Revocation Risk: Either partner in an IVF process can unilaterally contact the fertility clinic and revoke consent for embryo transfers without notifying the other party. Rubin did exactly this, withdrawing consent before informing Millinder. Couples should negotiate and document irrevocable consent terms with legal counsel before beginning IVF to prevent unilateral withdrawal mid-process.
•Timing and Biological Urgency as Legal Arguments: Millinder's legal team successfully argued at the lower court level that her age, infertility diagnosis, and the embryos representing her last viable path to biological parenthood outweighed Rubin's objection. Courts in embryo disputes increasingly weigh one party's irreversible biological window against the other's desire to avoid parenthood when no clear contract exists.
•Legislative vs. Judicial Approaches: Arizona passed the first state embryo custody law in 2018, directing courts to award embryos to whichever party intends to use them for reproduction. Michigan's Supreme Court declined to rule on a similar case in 2024, deferring to the legislature. Individuals in states without legislation face greater legal uncertainty and should monitor pending state-level reproductive law developments.

Notable Moment

After a lower court ruled in her favor, Millinder raced to complete an embryo transfer before her husband could file an appellate stay blocking the procedure. She succeeded by days — the stay arrived after the transfer was already complete, and she later confirmed a successful pregnancy.

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Episode Transcript

If you like YouTube, you'll love YouTube premium. I'm Destroying, and with YouTube premium, I get half free videos, offline downloads, and so much more. Make sure y'all try YouTube premium for two months free at youtube.com/premium. Trial eligibility varies, terms apply, and cancel anytime. From The New York Times, I'm Rachel Abrams, and this is The Daily. In recent years, more and more Americans have been turning to IVF to have children, which means more and more embryos are being stored in fertility clinics all over the country. And that has made one question increasingly urgent. What should happen to those embryos if a couple breaks up? In much of the country, the legal system has no clear answer to that question, nor does it have clear rules for weighing one person's desire to become a parent against another person's desire not to. Today, my colleague Caroline Kitchener tells us the story of one couple that found themselves caught in this exact limbo. It's Thursday, September 10. Caroline, you recently chronicled this really heart wrenching fight over embryos that this one couple had made when they were still together. And the fight and how it unfolded touched on all kinds of issues that really felt very much of our time, like modern fertility treatments, the question of when life begins, the shape of what a family looks like in our day and age. So tell us how all of that fits into what you cover and how you came to this story. So I cover a really broad range of issues related to women and families. But I've been paying particular attention over the last year or so to IVF because we've been hearing about that more and more from our politicians, especially. I mean, the Trump administration has talked about IVF more than any other president ever, starting with his campaign promise to make IVF free and widely accessible for all. And as we're hearing more about IVF, as more and more families are turning to IVF to have children, I think that there are a lot of really new, complicated, and totally fascinating questions around life when you engineer it in a lab. I think most of us are familiar with the broad outlines of IVF. Like, IVF is a process that helps people have children. Right? But when you talk about these questions that it raises as more and more people are doing it, what specifically about IVF is at issue here? So IVF or in vitro fertilization is a process by which egg and sperm are combined together to create an embryo in a lab outside of the uterus. And often, embryos are frozen and stored for future use. And there are a lot of murky gray areas that people are just starting to explore and think about differently. One of which is the question of what happens to those embryos if a couple breaks up? Who has custody of the potential for life? And …

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