While Belgium is top, with 40.5% of infertility patients becoming pregnant, British clinics manage only a 28.6% success rate, eclipsed by countries such as Slovenia and Ukraine.

Although Britain produced the first test tube baby 28 years ago, it now lies 17th out of 23 countries that submitted data for the European Society for Human Reproduction and Embryology (ESHRE) table.

The figures also show that British clinics have the highest rate of complications caused by specialised drugs used for in-vitro fertilisation (IVF), and the highest rate of abortion of healthy IVF babies with a technique called “foetal reduction”.

The procedure involves placing two embryos in the woman’s womb in the hope that at least one of them will implant. If both develop, one of the twins is destroyed by injection to stop its heart in order to increase the growth potential of the other.

“Many doctors consider the procedure ethically unacceptable,” said Karl Nygren, a professor of gynaecology in Stockholm, who compiled the ESHRE statistics. “It also causes major depression. The women mark the birthday of one child and the death day of the other.”

British doctors admit clinics here cost more. In Iceland, one of the most effective countries for IVF, it costs a couple £7,000 on average to achieve a successful pregnancy. In Britain, one cycle of treatment can cost £10,000.

Gedis Grudzinskas, director of the Bridge Fertility Centre in London, said he was aware of some patients in Britain who had invested £100,000 without success.

“We don’t even have a level playing field for them to compare the success rates of different clinics,” he said. “We are lobbying for a standard benchmark, like clinics being made to declare their pregnancy rate in 35-year-olds having one embryo transferred,” he said Grudzinskas blamed the overall performance of British centres on poor training for scientists.

“Most European clinics have state-of-the-art equipment funded by governments,” said Bill Ledger, professor of obstetrics and gynaecology at Sheffield University, who also runs an NHS IVF clinic. Although his unit has a new £1m laboratory, many clinics are stuck with substandard facilities.

“The problem we have is a largely market-led industry, where people charge what the market will bear,” he said.

According to the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA), the industry regulator in this country, annual spending on treatment is up to £500m a year in Britain. A spokesman said there is anxiety that women are being channelled into ever more costly treatments that might not help them.

The question of how to control the trend will be addressed at the HFEA annual conference on Tuesday by Debra Spar, a Harvard business school economist, who has published an analysis of the fertility business. “Increasing numbers of people will want to exert control over conception,” she says. “Unless we want this market to spiral out of control, we have to regulate it.”

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