So whose sperm is it anyway?

If we want men to be better fathers, the decision to have a child cannot rest solely with women

PETER WALLIS is, by all accounts, an ordinary chap who had been going about his life in a blameless sort of way. Until this woman Kellie Smith ruined it all. Or so he claims. There they were, two grown-ups having sex with no worries because she was on the pill. How was he to know that during one rapturous climax his innocent, happy sperm was being deliberately tempted to reproduce through an act of gross deceit and theft?

Kellie, you see, unilaterally decided to stop taking the pill because she wanted a baby. Wallis has accused her in a court in New Mexico of denying him the right to consent to fatherhood and of "intentionally acquiring and misusing" his precious sperm. The defence argues that at the moment of ejaculation Wallis "surrendered his right of possession". I have heard of a women's right to own all that is in her body, including her baby (a dangerous idea at times); this is a new and dodgy one. Smith's lawyers also argue, disingenuously, that if he wanted to hang on to his seed he should have used a condom or "other measures to stop the spill".

Stop laughing. This is not a Bridget-Jones-finally-gets-desperate story. It is a serious moral dilemma of our times and a predicament that could have surfaced only in the late 20th century. In some ways, of course, it is not. The anguish of men caught up in anxieties of biological fathering has long been the stuff of drama at its most intense. Think of Strindberg's unbearable The Father, about the torment of never knowing truly whether a child is yours. The playwright was consumed by this in his real life, too. Today all his nightmares would be sorted out within a fortnight of providing the right body fluids. But progress often raises even more complicated questions.

This case, for example, shows the clashes between science, morality, feminism, new man-ism, individual freedom, sexual liberation and the politics of family - and the role of the state in all this. Some British feminists have seen this case as yet further evidence of how men are running scared of controlling women (and a good thing too, is the implication) who took their jobs and their domestic power and are now helping themselves to their seed. I find this demeaning to men and to feminists.

Wallis has a serious case here. If we are asking fathers to take greater responsibility so that they not only provide for children financially but also learn to be equal parents in all those big and small ways that mothers take for granted, then we must accept, too, that men must have a choice in the matter. Biology makes arguments of equality difficult in this area of life.

If mistakes are made on a wild night that ends in a pregnancy, it is of course the woman who has to face the more difficult traumas and the entire physical cost. But this does not give us the right to grab and determine all the decisions that follow. Not in this day and age. Wallis may want to be an involved father when he does decide to have a child, and perhaps he feels that the spirit of this earlier, unwanted child will for ever blight that moment in the future.

The fact that Smith wants a child should not be reason enough for her to go out and simply get one, as she would a made-to-order birthday cake. She is thoughtlessly making lifelong decisions for three people here. Even if she demands no financial support today, what if something happened to her, or her finances became so tight that she had to turn to the state, which would then demand money from the reluctant father?

This is a major complaint faced by the troubled Child Support Agency. Many fathers (a lot of them selfish brutes who are lying to get off paying anything) claim that they are victims of the system and women who got themselves pregnant. There is no way you can prove or disprove this, but we can say loudly and clearly that for women to choose to have a child without consent from the father is, in most cases, wrong.

If you want to have a child without a partner, why not go for artificial insemination from a donor? If it is about making a man commit because he won't, is it really wise to blackmail a person into parenthood when it is so very hard even when freely chosen? What Smith has also not calculated for is the possibility that her child will resent her actions to go it alone as much as her sexual partner does. Then will it all seem worth it?