The UK fertility regulator may radically commercialise IVF to enable British women to be paid thousands of pounds for donating their eggs. The supply of eggs and sperm for infertile couples dried up as soon as the government removed donor anonymity in 2005. Now there are long waiting lists and many couple resort to IVF clinics overseas.

Regulations might also be relaxed to allow one man’s sperm to create up to 20 children despite the danger of unwitting incest. The current limit is 10.

"We want to remove obstacles to donation," an HFEA spokeswoman said. "There are waiting lists of various lengths for people wanting to get access to treatment with donor eggs or sperm. We want to see if our policies are contributing to an unnecessary delay."

A public consultation on a market in gametes will begin in January 2011 and will run for three months. The results will be made available in May 2011.

Professor David Jones, director of the Anscombe Bioethics Centre in Oxford, and an adviser to Catholic bishops told the Guardian: “The church finds IVF ethically problematic and donor conception is worse… because it means the mother and father of the child won't be its biological parents. So when you start to pay people for it, it's even worse because you are encouraging, in the crudest kind of way, people who aren't going to be involved in the rearing of children to donate sperm or eggs.

“It's not just the church – a lot of people find the idea of payment problematic, because it's demeaning to procreation, that you should pay someone to take their child from them biologically."