ABSTRACT
This chapter maps out the legislation, practices, and discourses on reproductive technologies in the postcommunist region, with a specific focus on Poland. The aim is to highlight both regional specificities and global tendencies, showing how the proliferation of biotechnologies may lead to a variety of policy outcomes, practices, and cultural discourses, embedded in ideals of reproduction, family, and political community. Today, reproductive technologies are practiced both within and across national borders, and the way in which they are imagined and regulated reflect the complex and multilayered character of these practices. In line with this trend, Poland and other postcommunist countries do not represent a uniform policy pattern and cannot be distinguished from western countries by a specific set of practices. Rather, they present an assemblage of national, regional, and global trends which give rise to contradictory effects in different contexts: whereas in Poland policies aimed at protecting the nation involve restricting access to assisted reproduction techniques, in Hungary and Bulgaria nationalistic discourses lead to the widening of access to reproductive technologies, albeit only for specific groups.
