If Louise Brown's mum has kept every newspaper cutting mentioning her daughter since her birth 25 years ago, she will have a collection painful in its repetition of opinion. The debate over infertility treatment has raged with the same arguments over and over since Louise became the world's first test-tube - now IVF - baby.

Medical science has bounded forward - since then, more than 50,000 children owe their existence to IVF techniques - but our ethics and our compassion seems to have stuck oddly in reverse. Infertility can be a desperate condition, so the hope IVF and other treatments bring to childless couples cannot be underestimated. But the odds on success aren't great while the emotional and financial cost is.

The Government and the NHS have resolutely refused to fund interventionist baby-making procedures and their stubborn stance is backed by healthily fertile commentators who have sometimes seemed to think infertility is nature's way of allowing their own kids to enjoy smaller class sizes.

Around the country, there still exists the postcode lottery that has seen a quarter of Britain's health authorities allowing some couples, with strict eligibility conditions, one, sometimes two, cycles of IVF treatment free. Doctors advise most people to have at least three cycles to give them a good chance of getting pregnant, IVF being far from the great birthing machine it is popularly perceived to be, with the majority of patients failing to become mothers.

And if it is bad enough being diagnosed as having a fertility problem without being told that treatment depends on where you live, then how about the three-year waiting list for treatment, with every birthday callously marking a drop in a woman's chances of conceiving through IVF, just as they do for those able to conceive naturally?

Now, in a spectacular smokescreen hiding a vicious piece of exploitation, the first clinic has been allowed to offer cut-price IVF - a procedure that costs up to £3,000 per cycle with a less than 15 per cent success rate - to women who will donate eggs to other couples.

The shortage of donors in this country is undoubtedly a frightful situation for those women who cannot produce their own eggs. Stranger donors, acting from purely altruistic reasons, amount to an estimated few hundred a year, far less than demand. It is also a practice that has been attacked as medically unsound because of the health risks involved.

Eggs are collected, as they are in IVF, by an invasive procedure that involves a month's use of powerful drugs. There have been studies suggesting this not only causes lasting disruption to hormones, but may be linked to an increased risk of cancer.

For the women who will now take up this offer and 'egg give' in exchange for cut-price IVF treatment, it means double that risk and double the unpleasantness because they undergo the treatment twice - once to provide the donor eggs and once to produce their own.

Previously, anyone selfless enough to be willing to donate her eggs to a stranger has had to be under 35 - for fertility reasons - and have already had a child of her own - for emotional reasons. It was strictly regulated and no payment was allowed to the donor.

So why now have not only payments in kind been deemed acceptable but the vulnerability of childless people desperate to have a baby been so exploited? There may well be couples who are happy with this new situation, seeing it as a positive way they can help others and themselves. Whether or not they feel that way after endless cycles of invasive and emotionally draining IVF have failed to produce a pregnancy is another matter.

Counselling, where it may be available or helpful, is all very well but these are vulnerable and emotionally strained people, already under tremendous pressure to conceive, who really could do without the added mental stress. They want babies very badly. Their chances are slim.

People have sold houses and possessions, gone into debt, even bankruptcy, to fund their way through endless IVF cycles. Marriage break-up rates are far higher among infertile couples than others. They need support and compassion, not their situation reduced to some kind of marketplace bartering to hide the fact that the NHS is unwilling to shoulder their medical difficulties.

The biologically programmed ache for a child that so many infertile women are afflicted with can often be a matter of shame; for many, it is taboo to admit being crippled by pain every time they see a pram in the street or a work colleague or relative falls pregnant. Reducing this to a financial balancing act is obscene.

Aa a society, we are already spectacularly failing the children we do have. Thousands of older children languish in care, there is a dire shortage of foster carers, frontline social services are woefully underfunded and child abuse seems almost unchecked. That, of course, is an irrelevance to those who want a baby but it makes a mockery of the ongoing debate over whether or not having a child is a right.

We have a free health service. If we want to keep it, then we have to cough up the taxes to support it so that it works for all. End of story. It is time to bite the bullet and recognise infertility is a health issue and allow those who suffer from it equal access to NHS services in the same way as any other person with an illness.

But in an atmosphere where politicians cannot bring themselves even to discuss the T-word for fear that raising taxes will send voters into a blind frenzy of Daily Mail over-subscribing, and where the NHS certainly does not need another cost burden, the one in seven couples in this country suffering from infertility problems looks like being left to bear the heart-wrenching pain alone.