Can't decide whether you're ready for parenthood? If you're a man, you can simply deny your wife access to the embryos the two of you agreed to create. If you're a womanf well there's still the boat to England.

That's the harsh reality in the embryo case. If you believe the counsel for the man in the case, no one can be compelled to be a parent. You always have the choice.

I'm debating whether I should mention the actual names of the parents involved. In an issue of this importance, should we keep our emotional distance?

Should one of the most important cases in recent Irish legal history be remembered as involving merely dehumanised, pixelated faces of Mr and Mrs X . . . theoretical persons of no more consequence than lines of code in a computer programme?

Should we regard the three entities being held by the IVF clinic as potential persons or are they merely clumps of cells with no greater moral significance than a DNA swab from your mouth?

I knew a woman who later got her PhD in biochemistry, who thought exactly that.

Clumps of cells. A product of a hyper-strict Catholic upbringing, scientific materialism was part of her rebellion. Then she had a pregnancy scare. We'd fallen out of contact by that time.

Years later, she told me that if it had been a pregnancy, she would have had it aborted without ever telling the father.

When confronted as a teenager with a moral choice she'd had no real preparation to make, it seemed superhuman.

Despite my own Catholic upbringing, I have always come down on the side of respecting that choice. Philosophically, I believe the state has a very limited legitimate role in intervening in moral choices. Our consciences and souls are our own. The state cannot relieve us of those awesome responsibilities.

And being honest with myself, I never felt it would be right for men who dominate the structures of power to force a young girl into motherhood so that the male decision-makers can feel good about themselves on Sunday.

We're in entirely new moral territory with this embryo case. The person who demands their right of choice is not the mother, but the (potential) father. His argument is that it should still be his choice whether or not to become a parent at an inconvenient time of life.

His wife argues that the IVF contract they entered into was an irrevocable act.

No different, in essence, from having unprotected sex and being open to the possibility of children.

A voluntary choice with moral consequences.

So which is it?

Do we really have unlimited choices without ever having to choose? There's the rub. We love choice. We hate choosing.

Choosing means losing the freedom to choose.

And in our rich, libertarianminded modernity, technology continues to deliver new solutions that remove the urgency of choice. IVF means you can keep your options open, if not indefinitely, then pretty close. You're 65? It's not too late. You can have a baby. Don't want to let the embryos grow? Decide later.

But freedom without responsibility is just nihilism.

Our choices define us and our character. Even if we're not aware we're making choices.

The father in the embryo case may not have understood that signing that IVF contract meant he was open to fatherhood from any of those embryos. But his lack of understanding matters as little as an idiot teenager who thinks if you pull out before the end she can't get pregnant. It's still a choice . . . an irrevocable act. It carries potential consequences.

My biochemist girlfriend also knew that, even if she imagined she could shield me from it. She later told me she thought I was the father. This, despite the fact that because we never actually had sex, this was highly unlikely. Then again, the nuns taught her anything was possible. For a moment, my world imploded. Everything was different, until she told me that there had been no pregnancy after all. But I was never in any doubt about one thing. Even if it was her choice what to do about it, my soul would still bear the mark. All my choices had already been made.