LIKE many women in their early forties, Jill Hawkins wishes she was 10 years younger so she could have more children. But unlike other women of her age, the medical secretary says she has no desire to nurture and raise those babies.

Hawkins has already had seven babies for other couples and is now planning an eighth, making her the most prolific surrogate mother in Britain. While Hawkins, who has no children of her own, admits to getting “broody” and missing being pregnant, she says she has never wanted to look after or play with the infants to which she has given birth.

“I really love being pregnant and my body is very good at it,” she said. “I am very proficient at giving birth. But I still don’t want children of my own, not in the slightest.” It is a passion that worries her family who believe her multiple surrogacy is taking its toll on her mental health. She was diagnosed with depression nine years ago, a year after she was a surrogate mother for the third time. At one point Hawkins felt so miserable that she attempted suicide. She is still dependent on antidepressants.

Hawkins’s case raises questions over the largely unregulated world of surrogacy and the organisations that arrange deals worth more than £10,000. Some are overseen by fertility clinics, which are monitored by government agencies, but many are not. In these cases, hardly any official checks are carried out on the suitability and psychological welfare of surrogates - or the resulting babies.

Hawkins’s case will intensify demands on the government for tighter regulation, which it says it is considering. “A lot of family and friends are not very happy with my decision,” she said. “They think I am missing out on life, but I am not. I am very close to my sister and she was shocked when I told her that I was doing this again. They are just concerned for my wellbeing and believe that every additional pregnancy might cause too much mental anguish and that it might cause me to become depressed.”

Hawkins blames her lifetime battle with her weight and the death of one of her cats for the suicide attempt rather than the mental strain of carrying babies that are given away.

Hawkins, who weighed 19½ stone before she had a gastric bypass operation, said: “I felt so bad that I didn’t want to go outside and that is when I decided that life wasn’t worth living. Over a couple of months all I kept thinking about was killing myself.”

Hawkins, who will be paid £12,000 when her next baby is born, says she has never been in love. After her seventh surrogacy she had planned to join a dating agency but, instead, she agreed to be a surrogate mother again.

Hawkins, who lives in Brighton, has been put in touch with childless couples through the organisation Cots, which has 128 surrogate mothers on its books, resulting in about 50 births a year. Couples looking for a surrogate mother pay Cots fees including £850 for their initial year of membership and between £100 and £150 for subsequent years’ subscriptions.

Couples pay the surrogate mother between £10,000 and £15,000. Legally this fee can only be for expenses but the payments are widely acknowledged as compensation for the trouble of pregnancy and childbirth.

Cots support workers carry out assessments on potential surrogates but one of these, Robin Carter, a former social worker, and his wife Jay, who also works for Cots, have been heavily criticised in the past by a succession of High Court judges for their inadequate home study reports on behalf of potential adoptive parents.

In 2003, the judge said Jay Carter’s home study reports were “worthless,” grossly inadequate” and “positively and dangerously misleading”.

This weekend Robin Carter said he had no way of knowing whether the multiple pregnancies have been damaging to Hawkins’s mental health. He pointed out that as Hawkins’s GP had confirmed there was no reason why she should not be a surrogate mother again, Cots was not in a position to stop her.

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