The notion that mothers could be required by law to register the names of the fathers on the birth certificates of their children has been around for years. The latest version originated with John Hutton in July 2006, when he was Secretary of State for Work and Pensions. Enthusiasm for the idea waned when wiser heads pointed out that being forced to identify a reluctant or violent father could place vulnerable women and children in danger.

When Mr Hutton brought forward his Child Maintenance Bill a year later, the issue was not raised, apparently because someone had realised that registration of births was nothing to do with Department for Work and Pensions. The Institute for Public Policy and Research then took up the baton, timing its contribution for Father's Day 2007.

Kate Stanley, the head of social policy at the left-of-centre IPPR, announced that “everyone should know who to send a card to on Father's Day,” an assertion hardly more cogent than grammatical.

She went rampaging on through sense and syntax, laying all waste before her. “Most people will be thanking their fathers... but many will be wondering who their father is and why they have not helped support their family. Requiring fathers to be registered on a birth certificate sends an important signal about the duties of parenthood. It communicates the message that fathers have an equal role to mothers and that they must take their responsibilities seriously.”

Common sense tells us that a father's role is not equal to a mother's. A man can become a father and not know he's done it.

A woman can only become a mother after she has carried her child to term; regardless of what happens to her baby, whether it dies, or is given away, or grows up in her care, or commits a hideous crime, she will always be attached to it. She will suffer more for her child than she has ever suffered for herself. If her child is taken from her, she will experience pain at the site of the separation for the rest of her life.

This is a real difference between men and women; neither fashion nor politics can argue it away. Fathers may want me to believe that their experience of parenthood is just as involved and passionate as mothers'. As far as I'm concerned this is like the pretence that men suffer menopause. Claiming to replicate female experience is another way of belittling it, just another insidious variation of misogyny.

The perennial suggestion has come around again in the Welfare Reform Bill, to be debated later this year. Mothers will no longer be able to keep the name of the father off the birth certificate just “because a relationship has broken up acrimoniously”.

This is a curiously prissy way to refer to the prevalence of domestic violence and the role of such violence as an important cause of miscarriage, stillbirth and maternal death in this country. Considering that in any one year there are 13 million separate incidences of violence against a woman by a partner or former partner, it's surprising that only 50,000 men are left off birth certificates. In a third of cases the violence emerges only after the woman has become pregnant. The risk factors for domestic violence are three; being a woman, being young and being pregnant. Physical violence is only part of the story; women who fall pregnant are even more likely to be belittled, reviled, deserted, rejected and denied than they are to be bashed.

It should be obvious that in a humane society no woman or child should be forced into an enduring relationship with a reluctant and resentful father. We see fewer reluctant mothers than we used to because of the availability of contraception and abortion, but reluctant fathers have always been with us. In the ten years or so that DNA paternity testing has been available it has been used almost exclusively by men who have had a relationship with a woman and seek to disprove paternity of her children.

The State has proved so spectacularly incapable of getting recognised fathers to fulfil the obligations they have already acknowledged, that one can only wonder why they are so anxious to track down still more from whom they will fail to get a penny. A father who wants to take responsibility for a child whose mother wants no more to do with him will have the Government on his side. Heaven help the child if the mother wants nothing to do with him because she doesn't trust him around young children.

A woman must be relied upon to decide whether or not she wants or will allow the sire of her child to share their lives, and her decision should be respected. In the world according to the Welfare Reform Bill, the woman who had a fling with a married workmate in a moment of madness at the office party, say, found herself pregnant and decided to have the baby, would have no choice but to finger him, thereby wrecking his marriage and bringing disaster upon his children. Her only other option would be abortion, which may be entirely unacceptable to her.

The funny part is that a married woman who has a baby by someone other than her husband will be asked no questions. Her husband's name will be entered on the birth certificate as a matter of course. Neither the registrar nor the Government really cares who a child's real father is. What they really, really want is someone to foot the bill for raising it.

You would think that a Labour Government would know that the only way to make sure that no child grows up in poverty is, not to replace one inefficient and outrageously expensive bureaucracy with another that has even greater powers to harass and humiliate, but to provide for all children out of tax revenue.

That way all men and women provide for all children, including their own and ones they didn't know they had. Nothing else has worked

or will work. If Gordon Brown had the courage of his convictions, he would reform the taxation system and ditch this ridiculously unrealistic Reform Bill.

Times Recommends

• The ghost of Robin Cook haunts Chilcot’s feast
• The truth shouldn’t need oaths
• Violence: let’s separate the men from the boys