When Sarah Matthews heard Britain’s infertility industry watchdog suggesting last week that women be paid up to £3,000 a time to donate eggs, she could barely contain her anger.

“I was left paralysed and lost four years from my life as a result of this treatment. I will never be the same again,” she says. “I have been to hell and back because I wanted a child. I can’t believe they are suggesting young women take that sort of risk just for money.”

Matthews is one of many women who have been damaged — some fatally — by the drugs used to stimulate women’s ovaries to produce unnatural numbers of eggs. Her horror was provoked by a breezy statement by Lisa Jardine, newly appointed chairwoman of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA), who said last Monday that egg donors should be compensated to reflect the physical risks they undergo in order to help other childless women conceive.

Superficially, Jardine may seem to have a perfectly good point: there’s a shortage of eggs, so why not create a market where those who have them can sell to those who haven’t? After all, markets work for most things, why should eggs be different?

Jardine’s initiative has opened a furious debate about the rights and wrongs of selling body tissue — a practice banned throughout Europe.

Matthews is adamant that such a trade is not just unethical, but also actively dangerous. “Women will ignore the signs that things are going wrong because they want to be paid,” she says. “If they start complaining that they feel ill, the treatment will be abandoned and they won’t get the cash.

“Lots of people are struggling at the moment. They will see selling their eggs as an answer to their financial problems. They just won’t look at the dangers.”

Matthews, a former hairdresser, was 35 when she underwent fertility treatment after six years of unsuccessful attempts to conceive. She began to suffer excruciating pain within hours of having a total of 27 eggs extracted from her ovaries in one go. (To put this in perspective, in a natural ovulation cycle just one egg is normally released.)

Within four days she was in intensive care, fighting for her life after a series of devastating strokes. Not only was she paralysed down one side of her body, but her vision, hearing and memory also vanished. It took many months for them to return and now, more than a decade on, she is still unable to work full-time because of residual fatigue, speech and memory problems.

In 2005 she received £300,000 in an out-of-court settlement following legal action against her doctor, Manjit Obhrai, and the private BMI Priory hospital in Birmingham, where the treatment was carried out. A spokesman for the BMI group said Matthews's illness was not held to be the responsibility of the hospital, but that procedures had been radically improved in the intervening years. Obhrai did not return calls.

There have been four cases of brain damage or other serious physical harm in the UK in recent years and up to six deaths in similar circumstances.

Recent fatalities include Nina Thanki, a 37-year-old driving instructor, who died from deep vein thrombosis at Leicester Royal Infirmary in 2006, following complications related to an egg retrieval process; and Temilola Akinbolagbe, 33, from south London, who collapsed and died from a heart attack as a result of a drug reaction the previous year.

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