Frozen children and despairing embryos in the ‘new’ post-communist state: The debate on IVF in the context of Poland’s transition

Introduction

In 2012, a member of the Polish Parliament, in an official intervention entitled ‘concerning the countermeasure of admissibility of killing children in Poland’, asked the Polish PM: ‘Can and should living children be frozen, according to the Prime Minister?’ (Woźniak, 2012: 278). This question seems ridiculous, surreal, an element of a political happening. But in fact it is not. It is one of many similar voices in the debate on in vitro fertilization (IVF). But they are not entirely about this treatment method and reveal what is at stake in building a ‘new’ post-communist, democratic state after 1989. As I show in this article, the IVF debate also concerns citizenship, nation, state, and the role of the Catholic Church in it. The aim of this article is to follow the Polish debate on IVF in the context of Poland’s transition. As Joanna Mishtal writes, ‘The fall of state socialism in Poland in 1989 constituted a critical moment that redefined policies regulating reproductive health and access to care’ (Mishtal, 2009: 161). Many scholars consider how processes of nation-building rely on gendered discourses (Einhorn, 2006: 196) and note that in Poland the process of democratization is connected with limiting women’s reproductive rights (Graff, 2003; Watson, 1993), including the right to choose infertility treatment (Radkowska-Walkowicz, 2012a), in the name of traditional Catholic mores, and/or in the name of preserving the integrity of the Polish nation.

As I show below, the history of IVF in Poland reveals the various tensions in the Polish transformation to liberal democracy and it can be used to view a ‘big’ history of Polish transition. It is one of the micro-histories which make up this macro story about Poland after 1989. Thus, to understand the current debate on IVF in Poland it is necessary to place it in the wider context of Polish transition after 1989. And in turn, to understand the Polish transition to democracy it is helpful to follow the Polish debate on reproductive rights and health.

This article presents a history of the debate on IVF in Poland indicating its common points with the history of the process of Polish democratization, which is marked most notably by two events: the collapse of communism in 1989 and accession to the European Union in 2004. I offer an anthropological perspective drawing on discourse analysis – ‘the analysis of language as it is used to enact activities, perspectives, and identities’ (Gee, 1999: 4) – based on three years of research regarding the Polish debate on IVF. I conducted a series of in-depth ethnographic interviews with women who have undergone IVF, analysed parliamentary documents (including stenograms of parliamentary sessions) and followed media publications concerning assisted reproductive technologies (ART) from 1978, when Patrick Steptoe and Robert Edwards carried out the first successful IVF procedure. This article primarily focuses on the public discourse of Polish conservative journalists, representatives of the Catholic Church and right-wing politicians.

The IVF debate

In vitro fertilization technology has been in use in Poland for over 25 years, with success and social approval. However, at the end of 2007 a vehement debate broke out concerning the moral, legal and economic aspects of applying this technology of assisted procreation. The then Minister of Health Ewa Kopacz (the Civic Platform) announced she would launch efforts to finance IVF from the state budget (and in 2012 the government prepared a three-year programme funding procedure for 15,000 infertile couples, which started in July 2013). Although health care is public in Poland, up to then patients who sought IVF had been entirely dependent on treatment offered by the private sector, which dictated the conditions of the procedures and managed the provision of information on ART. Private infertility clinics, of which there are currently more than 40, are neither inspected nor audited by the state, but they employ virtually all available contemporary infertility treatments and attain good pregnancy rates in a global comparison (most of them voluntarily report to the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology). In Poland, as in other European countries, infertility is a big problem: approximately 20% of couples have difficulty conceiving (no pregnancy after at least 12 months of unprotected intercourse) (Sanocka and Kurpisz, 2003).

Importantly, IVF is not regulated by law in Poland. Several draft bills were submitted to the Polish Parliament, ranging from a very restrictive bill to ban IVF, to one drafted by a right-wing party making IVF provision punishable by imprisonment, to a liberal one with no limitations on IVF. It seems impossible that in the years to come the Polish Parliament will pass a liberal law regarding bioethical issues, taking into consideration the current political situation in Poland – the growing popularity of PIS (Law and Justice), a very conservative and populist right-wing party and the weakness of centre (liberal) or left-wing parties (including centre-right Civic Platform, which now governs in Poland).

In Poland, the conservative tendency is strictly connected to the increasing influence of the Catholic Church on politics, law and public opinion ever since 1989 (Mishtal, 2009; Stopler, 2005). The Vatican statement on IVF is clear: this technology is ‘illicit’. In ‘Instruction Dignitas Personae on Certain Bioethical Questions’, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith states:

The Church moreover holds that it is ethically unacceptable to dissociate procreation from the integrally personal context of the conjugal act … human procreation is a personal act of a husband and wife, which is not capable of substitution. The blithe acceptance of the enormous number of abortions involved in the process of in vitro fertilisation vividly illustrates how the replacement of the conjugal act by a technical procedure – in addition to being in contradiction with the respect that is due to procreation as something that cannot be reduced to mere reproduction – leads to a weakening of the respect owed to every human being. Recognition of such respect is, on the other hand, promoted by the intimacy of husband and wife nourished by married love.

The Church recognizes the legitimacy of the desire for a child and understands the suffering of couples struggling with problems of fertility. Such a desire, however, should not override the dignity of every human life to the point of absolute supremacy. The desire for a child cannot justify the ‘production’ of offspring, just as the desire not to have a child cannot justify the abandonment or destruction of a child once he or she has been conceived. (Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, 2008)

The current debate on various aspects of reproductive technologies in Poland is extremely heated and highly politicized. Politicians on the right, Catholic clergy (especially bishops) and journalists associated with the Church, use very radical language and criticize in vitro fertilization as a technique that plays with the lives and deaths of thousands and thousands of children. For them IVF means the production of children, which they equate with murders and the Holocaust.

Many commentators notice that the proposition to include IVF in publicly funded health care in 2007 broke the silence over new reproductive technologies in Poland. In fact, there was never silence over IVF, but its critique was less visible for ordinary people who were not concerned with the problem of infertility. Actually it was (and still is) an important subject in Polish discussions regarding: the influence of the Church on policy-making and social life in post-socialist Poland, and relations between Poland and the West, Poland’s place and role in the European Union. However, voices of opposition before 2007 were not so strong and common in media discourses.

The abortion debate

Over the last few years, the IVF debate became ‘the new abortion debate’ (Chełstowska, 2011: 104), with the same protagonists, arguments and bombastic references to God, life and death. The IVF procedure is called a sophisticated form of abortion. Archbishop Józef Michalik, an important actor on the Polish political scene, criminalizes and compares abortion and IVF, stating: ‘The killing of an innocent human being is a crime and it can never be justified. Both abortion and the elimination of a conceived life in a test-tube is murder’ (Michalik, 2009: 2). Politicians, journalists and leaders of the Catholic Church employ the same discourse to talk about fertilized eggs in laboratories that they use to talk about foetuses. Moreover, in both debates women’s rights are ignored and embryos’ or foetuses’ rights are considered (Holc, 2004). When women are expected to be silent, foetuses can scream (anti-abortion educational film The Silent Scream remains a strong argument for the Polish anti-abortion movement) and frozen embryos can be in despair. So, to understand the Polish discourses on IVF it is essential to reference it to the history of the regulation of abortion in Poland after 1989.

Since 1956 abortion for socioeconomic reasons was legal and offered free of charge in the public health system. After the fall of communism, a vehement abortion debate broke out and became the basic area for redefining the moral norms of the ‘new’ democratic state in opposition to the ‘old’ communist one. The Catholic Church, which supported the Polish anti-communist opposition before 1989, appeared to be the most important actor in this process. As Wanda Nowicka writes:

When communism collapsed, the Church took full advantage and gained real political power. Church officials entered the mainstream of public life, becoming very visible and influential. … It used the political and economic transformation of the state in 1989 to carry out a moral transformation of the society. … The Church was significantly supported and guided by John Paul II, who was adored by Poles and who visited the country eight times between 1979 and 2002. … the Pope made a number of strong statements on these issues, which had a significant impact on policymakers. … Bringing abortion back to public debate was seen by some politicians as a direct confrontation with the Church … . Politicians wanted to avoid such a conflict and often stated that they did not wish to provoke the Church, a position that confirms that women’s rights were sacrificed for political gain. (Nowicka, 2007: 184–185)

In consequence, very restrictive abortion legislation has been in force since 1993: abortion is legal only when the woman’s life or health is endangered, when the pregnancy is a result of a crime, or when the foetus is seriously malformed. The law protects physicians who refuse to perform an abortion for reasons of ‘conscience’. In practice, very often hospitals refuse to carry out the termination of pregnancy. The issue of abortion seems to be closed, but more and more often one can hear voices of conservative journalists and right-wing politicians claiming that the abortion law is too liberal and the termination of pregnancy should be definitively banned.

After their success on abortion, representatives of the Catholic Church and right-wing politicians felt able start the next battle: to try to ban in vitro fertilization. The effective comparison of IVF to abortion is the main strategy of IVF opponents, and language is the main battle field. In the context of the abortion debate, Agnieszka Graff, Polish feminist scholar, noted that ‘we lost the battle over language’ (Graff, 2001: 121). The success of ‘pro-life’ rhetoric in Poland is above all the effect of reshaping the language so that the term ‘termination of pregnancy’ was replaced by ‘murder’, ‘foetus’ was replaced by ‘unborn’ and ‘conceived child’ while ‘pregnant women’ became ‘mothers’. Notably, this new language was incorporated into official state documents (Chełstowska, 2011: 102). Rhetoric against IVF is based on the same rules: in vitro fertilization became the ‘production of people’, freezing embryos became ‘freezing children’ and embryo selection ¹ became ‘eugenics’.

It is obvious that the Polish abortion debate is not entirely about abortion. Eleonora Zielinska indicates that it ‘represents a coded discourse that reflects fundamental concerns, including the shape of the state itself, the state’s obligation to society (and vice versa), the rule of law, and … the scope of the protection of civil rights and fundamental freedoms’ (Zielińska, 2000: 24; see also Gal and Kligman, 2000: 10). Likewise, the current debate on reproductive technology in Poland is not about reproductive technology. It is the field on which political actors negotiate the national ‘moral code’ (Mayer, 1999: 3), national identity, gender patterns, the ‘cultural intimacy’ (Herzfeld, 1997) between social actors, the shape and conditions of participation in the ‘imagined community’ (Anderson, 1983), and first and foremost the impact of the Catholic Church on politics, law and the daily life of citizens.

Białystok

When the first IVF child, Louis Brown, was born in Oldham, UK, an influential Polish Catholic weekly, Tygodnik Powszechny, printed Józefa Henellowa’s article, in which she, like other Catholic representatives, cautioned against enthusiasm for this technology:

Now, the barrier of the threat of nature has been crossed: humans have managed to intervene in the very beginnings of human existence. Instead of the organism and its immeasurable natural and mental intimacy, there are alien hands and laboratory glassware, an artificially prepared envelope, a complex series of procedures that come as a shock to the human embryo. How will the new human bear it? (Henellowa, 1978: 1)

Nearly 10 years later, in November 1987, two years before the collapse of communism, the first child conceived using IVF in Poland was born. It was in Białystok, the largest city in northeastern Poland and a very popular and affordable destination for IVF procedures until today (there are three fertility clinics with professional staff and good pregnancy rates). Historically a destination for immigrants and a multi-ethnic and multi-religious town with a large Jewish population prior to the Second World War, the present day Białystok is on the one hand the cultural capital of eastern Poland, and on the other, the hometown of a very active group of skinheads and the neo-Nazi movement. Białystok, which is very close to the border with Belarus, can be seen as the eastern border of the European Union and the Shengen Area. The complex historical and contemporary political and social situation of this city is a good example of the complex Polish history of democratization, marked by neoliberalism in economy and conservatism in politics, under the influence of both western secular culture and the Catholic Church on mores, politics and social life, resulting in openness and tolerance as well as nationalism and homophobia. The present debate about IVF displays these tensions: in the mainstream media priests and politicians discuss the moral evils of IVF, while at fertility clinics it is possible to undergo every ART procedure (including surrogacy or eggs donation which are forbidden in many countries), because this is not regulated by law. Moreover, although the Catholic Church conducts a very strong campaign against IVF and more than 90% of Poles declare themselves as Catholics (a little more than half of Poles admit that they lead religious lives in accordance with the teachings of the Catholic Church) (Hall, 2012), the majority of Poles support IVF, regardless of their attachment to the Church or the party they vote for. According to the research reports that the CBOS (Public Opinion Research Centre) has been conducting since 1995, the majority of Poles (from 70 to 80%) approve of the use of IVF by married couples who cannot have children otherwise (the most controversial is the availability of IVF for single women – the support for giving them such a possibility has increased from 39% in 2009 to 48% in 2012). Despite the very clear and strong statements of the Catholic Church over the last few years, in 2012 the level of acceptance was higher than in previous years (79% support IVF, 16% are against) (CBOS, 2012).This strong support for IVF is connected to the Poles’ attachment to traditional values, especially to the family. Although IVF and other reproductive technologies have transformed common conceptions of kinship, the main symbols of the ideology of affinity in Euro-American culture have remained constant (Ragoné, 2004: 342). It is still the birth of a child that turns a couple into a family. That is why the Catholic clergy tries to persuade Poles that this technology is an offence against the family (Radkowska-Walkowicz, 2012a) and its representation in the nation. The discursive strategies of IVF opponents are very powerful and even if they do not lead to negative attitudes towards IVF in Poland or a ban on this technology, they can help the Catholic Church and right-wing politicians to broaden symbolic and real domination in the realm of reproductive choices, health and rights and to reinforce control over both family (and its meanings) and women in Poland.

Professor Marian Szamatowicz, a pioneer of reproductive medicine in Poland, mentions that when the first Polish IVF child was born in Białystok, they (Szamatowicz and his team) were deluged with letters:

One priest would rail from the pulpit about the inhumane practices of the clinic, which, according to him, were even more harmful than drug addiction and drunkenness, and the women would talk of their dreams in which they were cuddling babies. They were begging, writing that their husbands wanted to leave them, and that their hands were reaching out for other people’s infants. (cited in Konarska, 2004)

Nevertheless, at that time ordinary Catholic priests hardly showed any interest in this subject. One of my interlocutors, who underwent IVF treatment over 10 years ago, told me: ‘After in vitro I went to the Church to ask about baptism and I informed the priest that I was proud that my child had been born thanks to in vitro. And he probably didn’t even know what I was talking about. He said: aha …’ (interview, woman, Warsaw).

‘Moral collapse’

Throughout the first years of IVF in Poland there were not many critical judgements of new reproductive technologies in the media and only very controversial medical interventions were criticized by journalists, for example: ICSI (intracytoplasmic sperm injection, an IVF procedure in which a single sperm is injected directly into an egg); surrogacy; Nobel prize sperm bank; destroying unwanted embryos (what the Vatican has called ‘a prenatal massacre’); pre-implantation genetic diagnosis. Although in the early 1990s the media rather sympathized with reproductive technologies, one can observe the gradual development of political tension regarding IVF. By then IVF was already becoming a part of a history of moral collapse. ² The opinion that IVF is immoral and goes against the ‘will’ of God was gaining political representation.

In 1991 the then Minister of Health Władysław Sidorowicz placed IVF on the list of un-refunded medical treatment. This same year, a new article in the Medical Code of Ethics (a set of ethical rules that physicians must follow, and which define the priorities of their professional work) allowed physicians to refuse to perform IVF. Three years later this article was retracted, and in 2003 a group of physicians once again proposed (without result) the condemnation of IVF in the Code of Ethics. Jerzy Umiastowski (Chair of the Medical Ethics Committee of the Polish Chamber of Physicians) asserted: ‘the right to be conceived in the mother’s womb should be among the many human rights’ (cited in Krzyszkowska, 2003).

In 1997 Piotr Lewandowski, manager of Novum, the private fertility clinic in Warsaw, said: ‘The Church is opposed to this method, but there aren’t conflicts’ (cited in Bednarczuk, 1997: 7). But two years earlier – just after the first successful ICSI procedure in Poland conducted at this clinic – Novum had been the target of political attacks that aimed to close it. The head of the Warsaw health department, Dr Anna Gręziak, informed the prosecutors that a crime had been committed against the anti-abortion law, and ordered the clinic to stop these procedures. Finally, the Ministry of Health allowed Novum to continue its practice, but Gręziak’s complaint was a clear signal that IVF, like other women’s rights and reproduction in general, had become a political issue.

Since its beginnings, the development of IVF in Poland has been dependent on political decisions which was reason, among other things, for the fact that the private sector has an almost complete monopoly over IVF treatment. In Łódź, in the famous public Polish Mother’s Memorial Hospital, although gynaecologists were well prepared, had extensive knowledge and enough equipment, they did not carry out IVF treatment. Iwona Konarska wrote in 1991 in Polityka magazine: ‘Local clergy did not allow such things to be done in Łódź’. In the Warsaw Children’s Memorial Health Institute, the largest and most modern specialist paediatric hospital and research institute in Poland, the first successful IVF was carried out in 1988. However soon afterwards, the hospital’s new director banned IVF treatment. He claimed that this technology came from the Soviet Union. In hospital corridors one could hear that the cooperation of Warsaw physicians with the staff of the medical institute in Leningrad (the former name of Saint Petersburg) before 1989 proved that IVF was controlled by Moscow. The fact that the former deputy director’s wife was Russian caused suspicion of collaboration with the Soviet NKVD (the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs or Soviet security service) (Konarska, 1991).

Negative references to socialist times in Poland were a very important part of the Polish democratization process. The political capital of many actors was built based on their anti-communist past (real or invented) and an anti-communist rhetoric. In the early 1990s labelling something as communist or socialist seemed to be the best way to discredit it, so this strategy was used to stop the development of IVF technology as well. While in the early 1990s IVF opponents attributed this technology to socialism, 10 years later IVF appeared to be a western technology and symbol of the ‘civilization of death’. It is possible that fear of IVF is fear of liberal Europe, ³ and what is evident is that fear of the EU and liberalism is used in the battle against IVF. Before Poland’s accession to the EU, parliamentarians and politicians discussed among other things ‘a resolution on the inviolability of sovereign national competences regarding morality and culture’. Stanisław Papież (2003), Member of Parliament, asked if after annexation by the European Union Poland would be forced to co-fund medical research on unborn children conceived by IVF, and in this context he mentioned the murder of unborn children and Joseph Mengele’s medical experiments.

The association between IVF treatment and German (Nazi) experiments was suggested by political actors also 10 years later. In 2013, Jarosław Gowin, former Minister of Justice, who endorses the restrictive draft of the Bioethical Act, told private TV channel TVN that German scientists were importing frozen embryos from Poland and conducting experiments on them. So, one could think that once again in history, Polish citizens are endangered by Germany. One can add that in the rhetoric of the Catholic clergy as well as activists and journalists associated with the Church, the IVF procedure (as is abortion) is often called Holocaust.

In vitro fertilization, like abortion, became a national issue (on nationalistic rhetoric about abortion in Poland, see Gawlicz, 2005). Members of Parliament mentioned it during discussions on different EU regulations in the context of the role of Poland in the EU and in the process of the Christianization of Europe. Thus, nobody was surprised to find that words like abortion, in vitro, contraception, nation, Christianity, freedom are all spoken together. During discussions in the Polish Parliament on EU regulations regarding stem cell research, many politicians expressed opposition (Kulawik, 2009). Artur Zawisza (2006) argued that this kind of research always tends to lead to death, which is ‘unacceptable in European civilisation and Polish law’. Jarosław Gowin (2008) claimed that it was very important not to allow unmarried couples to undergo IVF, because it negated traditional morality, and in view of the moral revolution taking place in many countries Polish people had to clearly indicate that they support the institution of family. In this perspective Poland has an important role to play in liberal Europe, marked by ‘civilization of death’ and ‘moral collapse’.

New citizens

A country that perceives itself in this way, should especially aim to protect its ‘youngest citizens’, this means: frozen embryos – the main actors of the Polish IVF debate – a subject of legal rights and social care. Thus it was Jarosław Gowin (2009) who claimed: ‘I almost hear the scream of despair of those tens of thousands of frozen embryos, I feel their distress.’ For Polish IVF opponents, embryo freezing, like embryo selection, is the best evidence for the evil of IVF. In the abortion debate, one could hear ‘the silent scream’ of foetuses; in the IVF debate, the figure of the despairing embryo became crucial. This entity is very emotional and sensitive, but empowered in an exceptional way.

The process in which a foetus becomes a person, an independent entity, has been well documented in anthropological literature (e.g. Dubow, 2011; Petchesky, 1987; Radkowska-Walkowicz, 2013: 135–182). Embryos first came to exist as scientific work objects (Morgan, 2009) and as patients, and they were the object of parental care. Now they are at the centre of social and political attention as well (Holc, 2004). The abortion debate shows that embryos can no longer be treated as belonging to the medical domain or the family alone. They became members of the nation. An embryo is not only a resident of the womb or medical laboratory. It or he or she is a citizen. As Janine Holc writes in the context of the Polish abortion debate: ‘the foetal citizen is the “purest” citizen because he or she can be inscribed with the (yet to be actualized) practices, intentions, and rationality of the ideal liberal and democrat’ (Holc, 2004: 758).

Urszula Krupa, a Polish right-wing politician, often demands the recognition that embryos are people with rights to life, placing the problematic in the context of ‘European civilisation’. In 2003 in Parliament she stated:

Lack of proper view of the human being, lack of moral development and lack of references to God are the main problems of contemporary civilisation. This has very serious consequences: not only moral degeneration and psycho-pathologisation of society, but above all it causes the loss of human dignity because a human can be used as a cosmetic, in the production of tissues, to fulfil sexual drives or to give ordinary pleasure. (Krupa, 2003)

The status of an embryo has become a crucial marker of a ‘genuine’ democracy and this new citizen the ‘purest’ and the most innocent. ‘Frozen’ is called forth when it is necessary to emphasize the independence of the Polish nation and its role in Europe, which is endangered by the ‘civilization of death’. Politicians and clergy often cite John Paul II: ‘A Nation that kills its own children is a nation without future’. This formulation, invoked in the context of abortion, serves today as an important argument against IVF.

Like abortion, in vitro fertilization is called the ‘murder of Polish citizens’. For clergy, conservative journalists and right-wing politicians, thousands and thousands of Polish children are frozen in fridges in IVF laboratories. The huge number of these new citizens makes IVF opponents stronger and more convinced that they are right.

Therefore the problem of freezing embryos can be perceived as a national problem. Wanda Terlecka (2011), president of the Catholic Association of Polish Physicians, also links the in vitro procedure with problems of the nation, stating that the embryos which are destroyed during the IVF procedure could populate a city as big as Częstochowa. She used this example intentionally: Częstochowa, a medium-sized city in southern Poland, is known for its famous monastery of Jasna Góra, which is the home of the Black Madonna painting – an image which has often been seen as symbolizing the Mother of the Nation – and is a very famous pilgrimage destination (also for politicians). For many Poles it is the holy city. Thus a frozen embryo is a Polish citizen, an extraordinary citizen, an inhabitant of the holy city. It could be observed that at the end of 2011, before the government’s decision to fund the IVF procedure for 15,000 couples, the mayor of Częstochowa decided to partially fund IVF procedures from the city budget, which caused outrage among clergy and right-wing politicians and commentators.

While in the rhetoric of IVF opponents frozen embryos appear as pure, ideal citizens, children born thanks to IVF are presented as worse, as a dangerous entity. As I show in my article about the creation of monsters in the IVF debate (Radkowska-Walkowicz, 2012b), in Poland there is an aggressive campaign to criminalize this technology and those who use it and to stigmatize IVF children. IVF opponents attribute ‘monstrosity’ to children in the following ways: (1) psychological: in the context of IVF one can often read about identity crisis and even survivor syndrome, a term which was originally used to describe the situation of people who have survived the Holocaust; (2) social: in the rhetoric of IVF opponents IVF children feel lonely and their place in family relations is uncertain; (3) ethical: it is argued that they live at the cost of their little brothers and sisters; and above all (4) physical: they point to the possibility of bodily deformity and serious health problems in IVF children (Radkowska-Walkowicz, 2012b). As monsters, IVF children threaten other citizens and the whole nation, the ideal cultural construct of the ‘imagined community’ (Anderson, 1983), which plays the main role in the processes of democratization in Europe after 1989.

Nation

In the rhetoric of IVF opponents in Poland there are many references to the biological condition. This focus on biology characterizes the national rhetoric in Europe. Elżbieta Korolczuk indicates a similarity between the discourse of IVF opponents and anti-Semitism in Poland. She writes:

Like Jews, IVF children are potentially dangerous for the biological value of the nation, understood as a homogeneous whole. … especially that this danger is hidden, hard to recognize. … It allows us to understand a fundamental paradox of the Church’s attitude, which is formulated by some politicians, who call for unfreezing embryos: in order to protect ‘life’ … it is necessary not to allow their life to start or to stop the existence of embryos. (Korolczuk, 2012)

Anti-Semitism seems to be a paradigmatic mode of exclusion and stigmatization in Poland. In anti-IVF discourse the mechanism of exclusion is similar (obviously its range and social effects are not comparable with anti-Semitism) and IVF is constructed as the enemy of the nation (like Jews, abortion, homosexuals, transsexuals, feminists, ‘civilization of death’ and ‘gender ideology’). ⁴ IVF opponents point not only to the weaker physical condition of children born after IVF, but also to their biological ‘otherness’. In anti-Semitic discourse, Jews were depicted as having large hook-noses or characteristic ears; in anti-IVF discourse one searches for physical imperfections in the children. Father Franciszek Longchamps de Bérier, professor of law, member of the Episcopal Expert Team, claimed in an interview published in Uważam Rze (a conservative and nationalist oriented monthly magazine) that ‘there are doctors who can recognize an IVF child by a tactile furrow on [the] child’s forehead, a sign of genetic defects’ (2013: 84). Although a parallel between these two discourses is not evident, in the context of Polish history, marked by anti-Semitism, the obsession with the biological features of IVF children is striking.

Korolczuk (2012) notes that the rhetoric of representatives of the Catholic Church, although in theory it relates to moral categories, is based on a nationalist discourse in which the biological value of the nation is the most important. Democratization in Poland has taken place alongside a revival of nationalism and many researchers indicate that it negatively affected women (e.g. Fuszara, 2000; Gal and Kligman, 2000; Holc, 2004). In nationalist discourse women’s health is secondary to national health and control of women is a ‘logical project’ of this discourse (Gal and Kligman, 2000: 26). In an essay on reproductive rights under nationalist regimes, Patricia Albanese (n.d.) indicates, that:

National ‘health’ is perceived as far too important to be left in the hands of individual women and thus comes to be seen as something that is or should become regulated by the nation-state. … even after women won reproductive rights, the rise to power of nationalists resulted in the actual or attempted removal of these rights, all for the ‘good of the nation’. (Albanese, n.d.: 11)

The transition to democracy, marked by nationalist discourses, ‘could be coded as restoration of a patriarchy’, Graff (2007) notes. ‘A backlash against women’s rights was legitimized within a narrative of return to normalcy and national sovereignty’ (Graff, 2007).

There are a few studies about the connection between nationalism and women’s rights in Poland (e.g. Gawlicz, 2005; Graff, 2008; Hauser, 1995). Polish feminists have paid attention to the intensification of ‘gender talk’ in the early 1990s (Graff, 2007) and in the period of EU accession and they agree with many scholars who point out that ‘the seemingly neutral liberal discourse on citizenship notoriously excludes women … while nationalist discourses tend to be heavily gendered in ways that limit women’s agency, particularly in the spheres of sexuality or reproduction’ (Graff, 2007; see also Yuval-Davis, 1996). This process is very visible in Poland because the liberal camp was not interested in taking part in the debate about values, leaving the scene to the Catholic Church (Dunin, 2002; Graff, 2003).

Conclusion

While feminist scholars write about the connections between the abortion debate and national discourses, there has been no analysis of the role of the new reproductive technologies and IVF debate in negotiations regarding gender roles after the fall of communism. In my opinion, a deeper study of the Polish IVF debate in the context of national discourses and democratization processes reveals not only attitudes towards moral choices and ‘conceived’ life but also the strong position of the Catholic Church, its discursive power and the influence it wields on the government, Parliament, the law and the choices of ordinary people after 1989 in Poland. It also shows ambivalent attitudes towards modernity, medicine, science and above all gender roles. It seems to be evident that the idea of limitations on reproductive rights in Poland, including the right to infertility treatments, is aimed against women and it is about bodily and sexual discipline. The problem of women’s rights and reproductive rights in Poland is obviously connected to the nature of Polish democratization (Mishtal, 2009).

Essential to this discussion are also issues like tradition, marriage and above all family – which all the main actors of the IVF debate (including medical practitioners and infertility couples) define similarly: as a mum, a dad and at least one child. In this context family could be defined as a symbolic representation of the nation (McClintock, 1993) and abortion could be seen as the denial of the establishment of family and a lack of contribution to developing the nation, especially in the context of declining fertility rates which are observed in Poland and other Eastern European countries (Mishtal, 2012). But IVF gets ‘normalized, naturalized, and contextualized within the narrowest and most traditional definitions of family’ (Franklin and Roberts, 2006: 188) also in Poland. Moreover, thanks to IVF, more and more people are born; in Poland the percentage of IVF children totals approximately 1.5%, ⁵ which is the average for highly developed countries, although in some European countries more than 3.0% of all babies born are conceived by IVF. ⁶ The Catholic Church considers IVF procedures evil, seriously sinful and a crime against God’s natural law. Adopting a nationalist rhetoric, it has to be shown that this technology as a ‘technology of death’ makes the nation weaker and worse. So, the family created thanks to IVF is not the ‘real’ Polish family. Although ‘it is men who are generally expected to defend the “moral consciousness” and the “ego” of the nation’ (Mayer, 1999: 6), in the new post-communist country women have a special role to play: they are the biological reproducers of the nation and also its moral guardians (Yuval-Davis, 1996) in a nation which is healthy, moral and, in the Polish context, above all Catholic.

The connections between the IVF debate and nationalist discourses seem to be more complicated and not evident at first, but what is evident is the fact that the IVF debate is a part of a wider debate about democracy, the state, Polishness, Poles and Poland in the context of historical ties with the East, current connections with the West and future relations to global science.