CV NEWS FEED // Polish President Andrej Duda passed a bill into law last week reestablishing state funding for in vitro fertilization (IVF) treatment, despite appeals from the Catholic Church.
The move to reinstate public funding for IVF, which had been cut off for the past eight years, comes in the wake of a liberal partisan shift ushered in by Poland’s newly elected government.
The new parliamentary majority, which ousted Poland’s right-wing party, Law and Justice (PiS), is a coalition of centrist, center-right, and leftist groups led by Prime Minister Donald Tusk.
Duda’s office cited the country’s rapidly declining birth rate, which has fallen by 11%, in its statement announcing the decision to sign the bill.
Prior to the decision to pass the law, President of the Polish Episcopal Conference (KEP) Archbishop Stanisław Gądecki appealed to Duda in a letter, writing: “I kindly request that you refuse to sign the Act of November 29, 2023, amending the Acts on health care services financed from public funds,” appealed to Duda in a letter last week.
He continued:
Human life is a fundamental value and an indispensable good. It therefore demands absolute protection, regardless of the period and quality of human life. The in vitro method, meanwhile, is experimentation on man, its peculiar ‘production’ constituting ‘a form of seizure of human life’.
The United States Catholic Conference of Bishops (USCCB) explains, the Church teaches that IVF is immoral insofar as it diminishes the “marital act” to a “manufacturing process”:
Human beings bear the image and likeness of God. They are to be reverenced as sacred. Never are they to be used as a means to an end, not even to satisfy the deepest wishes of an infertile couple. Husbands and wives “make love,” they do not “make babies.”
However, Duda ignored the bishop’s request despite being a practicing Catholic, and his ties to the previous conservative government that had blocked IVF funding throughout its establishment.
