Roll up! Roll up! Great prizes to be won. Win a baby. Win your chance to rent another woman’s womb.

In the week that we learned the depraved depths of phone-tapping, courtesy of the soon-to-be-defunct News Of The World, we stoop to a new low of a monthly IVF ‘lottery’ with tickets going for £20 a throw.

Two days ago the Gambling Commission approved a raffle to win £25,000-worth of fertility treatment, dreamt up by a charity and fertility adviser called The Hatch.

While my greatest sympathy goes to those unable to have children in the normal way, this latest ethical nightmare cheapens human life almost as much as tapping into the mobiles of murdered Milly Dowler and the families who’ve lost loved ones.

And more: surely it comes very close to smashing through European Law on the commercialisation of human tissue.

If winners can’t make use of IVF treatment, it seems they can opt for access to surrogate wombs, spare embryos, plus egg and sperm donors. Surely it can’t be right to pay £20 to win access to another woman’s womb?

Why isn’t the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority immediately jumping in to condemn this latest trivialisation of human reproduction?

What of our MPs? Could some of their well-deserved noise directed towards the horrendous phone hackings of murdered children not be deflected towards this tawdry lottery to create children?

Can it really be in a child’s best interests that the lottery places no restraint on who can win a baby?

And, finally, what do we say to Little Junior when he wants to know where he came from?

“Hey, Johnny, we won you in a lucky dip!”