Polish bishops in crusade against in vitro fertilisation

Polish legislators began debating regulation for in vitro fertilisation yesterday, amid threats from the country’s Catholic Church that they face excommunication if they approve the treatment.

IVF, the process by which egg cells are fertilised outside the body in cases where couples have difficulty conceiving, is widespread in Poland but is not subject to any regulation.

Several draft laws are to be tabled in Parliament, ranging from a total ban punishable by prison to the authorisation of IVF and reimbursement by the state.

In a letter to Polish leaders on Monday, the bishops of Poland’s powerful Catholic Church slammed IVF as “the little sister of eugenics”, a science devoted to improving the genetic characteristics of human populations, notably used by the Nazis.

“They will find themselves automatically outside the community of the Church,” said Archbishop Henryk Hoser, the chairman of the Polish Episcopate’s expert group on bioethical issues and signatory of the letter, in an interview this week.

“A child must be conceived in a natural way,” he said. The reaction has stunned medical professionals involved in the treatment.

“Comparing physicians who practise this method to the Nazis is an insult to the memory of the Holocaust,” said Slawomir Wolczynski, professor from the Bialystok Medical Academy in eastern Poland, the first centre to introduce IVF treatment in the country.

“It is an unacceptable language of hatred,” he said.

In the past, Polish bishops have described IVF as “a kind of refined abortion” because it destroys embryos during each attempted fertilisation.

“The threats, attempts to pressure and blackmail are amazing,” Pawel Gras, spokesman for Poland’s liberal government, told the private broadcaster Radio Zet this week. Leftist opposition leader Grzegorz Napieralski accused the Church of doing everything in its power to block the legislative process.

President Bronislaw Komor­owski, himself a Catholic and father of five, has called for a reasonable compromise that respects both Christian sensibilities and the needs of “many, often desperate couples, seeking a way to have a child”.

Prime Minister Donald Tusk said on Wednesday that politicians were responsible to citizens, not the Church hierarchy.

Mr Tusk is supporting a draft tabled by his liberal Civic Platform party which authorises the freezing of embryos. An alternative draft does not allow for thisfreezing process, making it less effective.

The Church views the latter draft as less harmful because it prohibits storage of IVF embryos and therefore their selection and destruction. The Vatican regards an embryo as a human being from the second of conception.

Poland’s main conservative opposition Law and Justice party wants IVF banned, while some ultra-conservative groups are pushing for it to be criminalised.

Less than half of the 40 centres providing IVF treatment report the number of treatments, meaning the reported figure of 9,500 treatments is likely to be well short of the true figure. IVF treatment costs about 8,000 zlotys (€2,000), more than double the average monthly salary, and some on the left are pushing for the costs to be subsidised by the government.

“The method should be accessible to less affluent people. Everyone is entitled to have a child,” Prof. Wolczynski said.