A bright pink box fills my screen; soon it’s filled with blue cartoon sperm swimming towards a large, wobbling egg, where they congregate to spell the word ‘joy’. Alongside it is a message, which reads: ‘By becoming an egg or sperm donor, you could give the joy of starting a family to more than 200 people in Scotland, who need help becoming a family.’ It’s accompanied with the hashtag ‘JoyLoveHope’.

I’m looking at a digital advert, part of a series rolled out across radio and the internet in Scotland from 2021 until last year, where it culminated in National Fertility Week. Advertising for egg donors (and sperm donors) is a common – if ethically questionable – practice, and many private clinics do it. But this advert is different. It’s from the Scottish government.

To have a government involved in the soliciting and collection of women’s eggs is nothing if not dystopian.

This week, it emerged that Holyrood spent £186,000 on the advertising drive, which it said was necessary to hike the number of altruistic donations in the country. (In Scotland, unlike in England, egg donors can’t claim £750 in compensation for the weeks of treatment they must go through in order to prepare them for the donation.) Messages pushed by the government in the advertising drive included telling potential donors that ‘NHS Scotland needs egg and sperm donors for those who need your help to create a loving family’.

To donate eggs, a woman must be aged between 18 and 35 and be able to commit to a programme – under which women go through the same treatments as in the first stages of IVF – for three months before their eggs are collected. It is an invasive procedure not without risks (one being ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome, a survivor of which was left in hospital for two weeks and said it ‘nearly killed’ her) – but you’d be hard pushed to find them outlined on the Fertility Scotland website, a service commissioned by NHS National Services Scotland on behalf of Holyrood. Equally, the site makes no real reference to the fact that any child born will share your DNA – and that child, your biological son or daughter, may well be in touch in later life, because once they turn 18 they are entitled to information about the donor. And none of the adverts immediately mention the psychological impact of becoming a mother to a child who won’t be yours.

To have a government involved in the soliciting and collection of women’s eggs is nothing if not dystopian. Helen Gibson, the founder of Surrogacy Concern who obtained the staggering cost of the Scottish government’s advertising drive through a Freedom of Information request, told me she was ‘appalled to learn that the Scottish government were targeting their own people, as young as 18, for egg retrieval and sperm donation’. She added: ‘This is not territory the state should stray in to, and many will question whether £186,000 spent on advertising for gamete donors is an appropriate way to spend public money. In doing this, the Scottish government risks creating a situation where the public feel entitled to the eggs and sperm of others.’

The Scottish government has said that it ‘launched the recent national donor gamete campaigns to help alleviate’ the shortage of donor eggs and sperm in the country, and that ‘all donations are made through a desire to help those people in Scotland who need help becoming parents’. But state interference in matters as personal as egg donation – and the potential life that is created by their use – is deeply worrying. And asking women to donate their eggs out of ‘love’ preys on sentimentality for something that is deeply individual, and raises the question of ethics in the healthcare sector: when was the last time you saw an advert asking you to donate a kidney to a total stranger for the same reason?

The Scottish government’s advertising drive is a worrying glimpse into a future where the state thinks it can lay claim to women’s bodies. Genuine altruistic egg donation is an incredible gift for the families it helps to create. But it’s an incredibly personal decision and not something that should be pushed by the state. Whether the intentions behind such a drive are good doesn’t really come in to it when human wellbeing (present or future) is at stake.