A family court on Friday dismissed a lawsuit filed by a man who sought to reject parental relationship with his child as his estranged wife was impregnated without his permission using fertilized eggs stored by a clinic.

The focus of the trial was whether a Civil Code provision saying "a child conceived by a wife during marriage shall be presumed to be a child of her husband" should be applied to the latest case, which has drawn attention as a modern-day family relationship problem amid an increase of in-vitro fertilizations.

(Inui Maternity Clinic. *Image unassociated with story)

The Nara Family Court judged that based on the Civil Code the 46-year-old foreign man was in a position to be presumed to be the father, looking at the relationship with the former wife at the time she got pregnant.

The man filed the suit with the court in October last year seeking to confirm that he has no father-child relationship with the now 2-year-old girl. But his then wife, whom he later divorced, argued during a trial that there are no legal grounds for the man to deny his paternity in these circumstances.

According to the lawsuit and other sources, the couple, who got married in 2004, began fertility treatment from 2009 and their eldest son was born in November 2011 through the transplantation of fertilized egg. The couple, however, separated in October 2013.

In 2014, the woman underwent another procedure to transplant a fertilized egg, which had been preserved in a frozen state before the couple's separation. She delivered a baby girl in April 2015 before she and her husband divorced in October 2016.

The man has also filed a case seeking 20 million yen ($178,000) in compensation from the woman and the clinic involved, claiming he mentally suffered from the incident.

The clinic said earlier in a statement that it had assumed the transplant had both parents approval because the couple did not request the disposal of the eggs.