Yorkshire Television came under fire today for encouraging couples to join the race to make babies in time for the year 2000.

In a project called Birth Race 2000 they will screen special sex programmes in early April to get people in the mood and filming the subsequent births on January 1.

The idea was immediately slated as devaluing human life but a YTV spokesman said: "I think the criticism is taking this too seriously. We understand all the issues and we are not encouraging people to do something unnatural or abnormal."

Bradford's Bishop's Officer for Church in Society, Elaine Appelbee, said: "How far do people want to go down the line in terms of the trivialisation of human experience? It's like a circus."

Bradford's Mothers' Union president, Janet Wade, said: "It's desperately distasteful. It devalues the whole aspect of producing a child."

Methodist minister, the Reverend Geoff Reid, said: "I think people should stick to their existing family planning programmes and not be distracted by the calendar. "

The programmes in early April will be broadcast across the national ITV network and will include a documentary on ten couples who have agreed to have sex in the hope of producing a baby on January 1, 2000.

Those ten couples are now in the process of being selected but YTV says they all were looking to have children anyway.

Later a programme, with the working title of Waiting to Drop, will focus on those who have succeeded.

YTV will be approaching hospitals to film the end results.

A spokesman for Bradford Royal Infirmary, which at 15 babies a day has one of the busiest maternity units in the country, said it had no objections to taking part in the series.

"If the doctors and midwives are happy and the women and her family are happy we will be willing to co-operate with the filming," he said.

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.