Mel B is in Los Angeles trying to get the actor Eddie Murphy, who is the biological father of her daughter, to step up to the plate and offer daddy day care to Angel Iris Murphy Brown, aged four months.

“She will always know that she was planned, but I also want her to know that she has two parents who desire to be responsible for her during her life and who love her so much,” Mel B said.

Well, we cannot speculate as to Murphy’s commitment to Angel Iris (although he did tell Dutch TV that “I don’t know whose child that is until it comes out and has a blood test”).

But we do know that just as Scary Spice is rallying absentee fathers to take responsibility for their offsprings’ lives on behalf of all single mothers, the government is considering removing the right of genuinely loving parents of donor-conceived children to be named as the parents on their birth certificates, and the children’s real genetic inheritance to be spelt out instead, which seems on the face of it pretty odd.

If I was a child and a grown-up hinted that I was in some way “special”, I would be immediately suspicious, if not borderline frantic. As we all know, “special” is often a hopeless euphemism for “different” and being different is every child’s nightmare.

What all children want far more, so far as I can tell, is to be the same as the other children in their class, wearing the same clothes, eating the same lunch and doing the same things. Why else would Harry Potter have sold so many millions of copies within hours of going on sale to children around the world?

So, on the face of it, the news that a committee of MPs and peers has argued that the government should force parents to add the words “from donor” to birth certificates is a setback to the child’s yearning to be the same as everyone else.

As things stood before this, couples who conceived using eggs or sperm donated to IVF clinics could put their own names on the birth certificate and everyone could pretend the child born from a rent-a-womb by a sperm donor was in fact the flesh and blood of Mr and Mrs Average Joe. The fact that Mr and Mrs Joe loved little junior to bits and would jump in front of a speeding train for him had up to now been more important in the eyes of the law than whether they provided the DNA for his existence.

Now a transparent regime has been urged under which parents will have to record the clinical truth and at the age of 18 (if their adoptive parents haven’t shared the information about their birth parents at an earlier stage) a person can consult the register to find out whether or not they are donor conceived.

I think it’s difficult for anyone to judge how deeply affecting these matters are unless they have issues over their identity and origins themselves. That’s why the accounts last week of adults who discovered who their real parents were – too late for it not to be painful – made me agree with the committee and the Donor Conception Network that the change, although brutal, is overdue.

Tom Ellis found out at the age of 21 that he was the product of sperm donation: “I would go so far as to say that not knowing who my real father is feels like both parents deceived me for 21 years.” But the news confirmed something that he had felt in his bones: “I never shook off the uncomfortable feeling that I didn’t quite belong.”

David Gollancz discovered at the age of 12 that he was similarly conceived. “For the donor conceived, their story is a lie. When my father told me the truth back in 1965, I felt as though someone was standing in front of me tearing up my autobiography page by page.” I know that saying “My real mummy was an egg” is quite a big thing to admit in the playground. But if all the 25,000 or so children out there born by assisted conception were told early, so early that it was part of them, and if all the children born from here on are also told early (and frankly, with the current rates of older mothers and IVF and gay couples having children etc, the nuclear one mummy one daddy type household is something of a rarity in some schools already), then the more normal and easy it will be for all children, and all parents, to admit.

It’s not always pretty, but telling it like it is has the merit of being the truth. The more children who know from the start where they come from, be it donor sperm, or egg, or surrogate, or Mars, or whatever, the less grimly “special” these lucky and loved children are going to feel.

I tapped out the words “The End” with a satisfied sigh this week as I finished a book. I did a quick word count (90,000 plus, you go girl!), then carefully saved it in order to send it as an attachment to my publisher.

But when I tried to save it, my laptop made a negative plinking noise, the sort of noise that you hear during a radio quiz when the contestant klutzes, and my screen went blank.

Then this long rectangular box came up on the dead grey screen with a big red cross shouting “Warning”. I peered at it, alarmed at the prospect that a year’s work had been irrevocably lost or corrupted.

“This document contains too many spelling and grammatical errors to continue displaying them,” it said.

I would like to point out in my defence that I wrote the book using Microsoft Word and I think this software assumes that something called American English is right and English English is wrong (well, I jolly well hope so, as I’m still smarting from the reviewer who described my last book as being full of mistakes, even though it was fiction).

But still. It suddenly made me understand the point of that annoying advertisement showing the square neek in a suit holding up a sign saying Microsoft and the hip media creative in chinos with one saying Mac.

I can’t see groovy Steve Jobs popping up to tell Mac users their work sucks, dude. But I can very easily see grey Bill Gates telling me that my book is riddled with errors – as, let’s face it, he just did.

rachel.johnson@sunday-times.co.uk

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