What is it about sperm? In the thesaurus of life, perhaps only blood among bodily fluids bears more metaphoric weight. Nonetheless, I bet blood doesn't have as many synonyms, especially if slang terms are included.

As one of the chapters in Sperm Wars details, the Greek philosopher Aristotle thought that semen was "the most refined of substances, combining distilled brain fluid and the fundamental elements, water and hot air". In the same chapter, Anton Mischewski claims that the first person to see individual human spermatozoa was the Dutch microscope maker Anton van Leeuwenhoek in 1677. In a kind of prequel to our current debates about the ethics of stem cell research, van Leeuwenhoek had to explain how he obtained the semen - it was thought sacred and could only be legally exchanged between a man and a woman for the purposes of reproduction. Van Leeuwenhoek said his samples were "residue after conjugal coitus" and escaped serious censure.

Science during the past 300 years may have demystified what sperm is and does, and the new reproductive technologies being deployed in the West may have diminished the sheer symbolic load that sperm carried in van Leeuwenhoek's time, but if you think that sperm is (as it were) politically impotent in our society, then just remember the stain on Monica Lewinski's dress, or the kerfuffle over whether lesbians should have access to sperm to reproduce without the need for men.

But Sperm Wars is about much more than a mere history of semen.

It is a commendable and readable gathering together of articles on the legalities, technologies, and a few of the histories of (non-traditional) reproduction. It describes a kind of politics or sociology of reproduction for our time, which will no doubt look both quaint and heroic in the years to come. Many chapters tell a personal story as well as an institutional one. Some tell how individuals have been actively excluded on moral, religious, legal or medical grounds from having children. Others argue against introducing 'big biotech and weird science' as if reproduction were a no-go area for medicine, a sacrosanct space where God's idiosyncrasies and cruel jokes are to be endured but never tampered with.

This is an important, accessible and engaging collection, which succeeds admirably in describing the cultural complex we call 'reproduction' today from a variety of angles.