Faced with some of Europe's most restrictive reproduction laws, Croatian couples with fertility problems are finding they may need to go abroad to have a baby.
"It is really hard and sad that someone can limit your instinctive wish for a child," says Ksenija Puskaric, 31, referring to the law on medically assisted reproduction that sparked outrage when it was adopted a year ago.
After undergoing two unsuccessful in vitro fertilisation (IVF) treatments in Croatia, Ms Puskaric and her husband have been forced to seek medical help in neighbouring Slovenia to realise their dream of a family.
Croatia's law, slammed by rights groups, bans the freezing of embryos and allows fertilisation of only three eggs per attempt.
The remaining eggs harvested during the procedure are frozen for later use, but couples say this drastically reduces their chances of a positive outcome.
"I have no need to enter a Croatian clinic any more," said Ms Puskaric, a journalist.
"I simply don't want to put my health at risk due to some experimental procedure that someone is pushing as a standard, which it is certainly not," she said.
Until the new law came into force, Croatia was still working under old rules on IVF adopted in 1978 when it was part of the now-defunct Yugoslavia and when the world's first "test-tube baby" was born.
Because the law had become so outdated, it did not cover new technologies - such as embryo freezing - which clinics in Croatia took to utilising freely.
Proposed reforms had circulated since the late 1990s, but they did not reach Parliament because of strong opposition from the Catholic Church, a powerful voice in Croatian society.
Nearly 90 per cent of Croatia's 4.4 million people are Roman Catholics. The law that was finally passed in 2009 is seen as the ruling conservatives' concession to the Church, which holds that life starts at the moment of conception.
"An embryo is a living being so we are not allowing embryo-freezing," Health Minister Darko Milinovic has said.
But critics say the law's limitations go against current medical standards.
"This is restrictive because it does not provide a possibility for treatment that couples should have according to medical standards," says Karmen Rivoseki-Simic of the RODA parents' rights group.
No other country in Europe limits fertilisation to three eggs, since there is no way to determine which eggs have the best potential, nor do they completely ban the freezing of embryos, she said.
Egg-freezing, more sophisticated than embryo-freezing, is generally used for women with cancer who want to preserve their fertility before undergoing cancer treatment.
The European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology (ESHRE) says that at this stage egg-freezing should be regarded as experimental.
The Croatian law was slightly amended in October mainly to make the treatment easier for non-married couples, but the main controversial stipulations have remained.
Last month a national association of reproductive health specialists adopted a proposal to change the law to enable freezing of embryos and fertilisation of more than three eggs in particular cases, accounting for about 15 per cent of the overall number.
"The Church has an unacceptable influence here, and the law is actually violating human rights," Mirjana Krizmanic, a social psychologist, said.
"The right to parenthood is one of the basic human rights and if it has to be achieved with medical help it should be done in the best possible way," she added.
The first statistics on the impact of the law, released in May, have also caused debate.