ABSTRACT
For more than 20 years there was inertia within the Polish political parties regarding assisted conception. It could be argued that the inability to set up a law that regulated ARTs at the national level was an outcome of intersecting political and religious factors and the power relations operating behind them. The Polish Catholic Church’s reservations about ARTs apparently played a significant role in both the political and public aloofness toward technologically aided reproduction. For a variety of reasons, the Vatican considers ARTs to be unethical (Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith 1987, 2008). First of all, they are evaluated as immoral because they bypass the reciprocal encounter, disrupt the bodily connection and expression of love, and as such lead to dehumanization. Second, they are judged as unethical because of the possible donation of sperm and egg cells (the act of treachery occurring within marriage) and the treatment of embryos, which are not approached as human beings (e.g., freezing of embryos), as the Vatican considers them to be. The Polish Catholic Church shares the Vatican’s position on ARTs. In countries such as Poland, where the Catholic Church is strong and Catholic doctrine is recognized as important, the Catholic Church itself, along with the practices it recommends, cannot be easily disregarded. By saying this, I am not trying to argue that the strong position of the Polish Catholic Church and its negative assessment of ARTs were the only reasons for the absence of a law concerning ARTs. Yet, even if it was not solely the position of the Polish Church and its doctrine that prevented politicians from proposing and passing ART legislation, still the Church’s negative assessment of ARTs could not have been easily bypassed or ignored by Polish politicians. The breakthrough came about only in 2015, in a year of presidential and parliamentary elections, when the ruling party Civil Platform (Platforma Obywatelska, PO) proposed ART legislation known as Ustawa o Leczeniu Niepłodności [The Act on Infertility Treatment] (Sejm Polski 2015) and then pushed it through both the lower and upper houses of the Polish Parliament. In July 2015, President Bronisław Komorowski signed the Act. However, his decision and the Act itself have been heavily criticized by the Polish Catholic
Church and right-wing politicians from the Law and Justice Party (Prawo i Sprawiedliwość, PiS), who are very outspoken about their affinity with the Church. The Act should have come into force three months after it was signed. Yet, PiS announced that, once successful in the parliamentary elections, it will immediately block the recently signed Act. In this chapter, I briefly discuss the inertia around ART legislation in Poland. This discussion is intended to highlight the entanglements between policy making and religion and the influence the latter may have on the former. By doing so, the text remains in close affinity with those by Perrotta, McDonnell and Mehrabi (this volume), contributing to an understanding of the complex interactions between religion and state policies. Moreover, recognizing the necessity of having ARTs regulated at the national level, I discuss the ways in which ARTs were practiced in Poland and also highlight the problems entailed by the absence of ART legislation. This particular discussion emphasizes the need to introduce national-level legal regulations and is partially based on in-depth, semistructured and qualitative interviews, which I conducted in 2005 in my mother tongue Polish with Polish doctors and 13 heterosexual Polish couples who had successfully participated in assisted reproduction. Furthermore, I briefly present the content of the Act on Infertility Treatment signed in July 2015. Finally, I argue against one of the Catholic Church’s objections to ARTs (i.e., assisted reproduction qualifies as an unethical procedure because conception does not follow a reciprocal encounter) and contend that it is possible to assert bodily connections, expressions of love and lack of dehumanization even when conception is technologically enhanced. In order to argue in favor of ARTs, I refer to the empirical material, the in-depth interviews conducted with the heterosexual Polish couples, and the philosophical concepts of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1987, 1994).
