Only the delusional will believe that the ruling against Natallie Evans and Lorraine Hadley is controversial. That men should not be compelled to become fathers against their will is so blindingly sensible, so patently egalitarian, that it cannot be wrong. It is as enlightened as the principle that a woman alone must decide whether to give birth to a child she carries in her womb.

But that is not what the plaintiffs asserted. They claimed that their former partners’ refusal of consent to use frozen embryos amounted to a “male veto” over their inalienable right to have children. Let us follow that illogic for a while. It leads to unpleasant places.

Had Mr Justice Wall not issued the ruling he did in the High Court yesterday, men would be obliged to shoulder lifelong legal and financial responsibility for children they do not want and, crucially, need not have. The father as a partner in child-rearing would be obliterated. Men would become mere commodities.

But surely, I hear the plaintiffs cry, men who abandon their families are already treated as commodities by the law. They must support children to whom they have little or no access and have no power to prevent the termination of a pregnancy. This analogy is utterly wrong. The difference between supporting a child and accepting obligations to one that need never exist is huge. A father who leaves his partner after the birth of a child, or during pregnancy, knows he can’t avoid his responsibilities. He has played his part in that child’s creation. He has not been denied the freedom to choose, just compelled to accept the consequences of his choice.

The implantation of a fertilised embryo years after the death of a relationship is entirely different. It has been decreed that it requires the consent of both contributors. Anything else would cause outrageous injustice. It will be of little solace to Ms Evans or Ms Hadley, but if the law permitted what they claim to be their right, it could not reasonably object if the male participant in the creation of an embryo demanded identical treatment. Thus, a man who entered into a subsequent relationship with a woman who proved to be infertile could insist on the implantation of a former partner’s embryo in his new partner’s womb.

Is that inconceivable? To the fading falange of Seventies ultra-feminists, it will make sense to insist that women but not men should enjoy this alleged right. To mantras including “all men are rapists” and “women need men like fish need bicycles” they would willingly add “wimmin alone are entitled to decide to become parents”. Such injustice appeals to a class that dismisses logic as a masculine power conspiracy. It ought to revolt everyone else.

Gender conflict has taken us far enough towards removing men from all but the mechanical and pecuniary aspects of child creation. Some of us are worthy of more than just a quick bonk. We respect a woman’s right to control her fertility and accept our duty to share the burden of child-rearing. We are not just commodities to be exploited and cast aside.

What the High Court asserted yesterday was not a male veto. It was a challenge to the demented myth that women are entitled to have children, even if they cannot conceive naturally and even if it means compelling a man to father a baby he does not want. It was a timely reminder that men and women are equal before the law.

Emmeline Pankhurst would approve. So should any woman who accepts that the battle for equality was not fought in order to reduce men to the status of wandering genetic codes — only useful until science devises a reliable method of procreating without them. No matter how imperfect the male of the species, he is still more than a sperm donor with a salary.