Polish opposition seeks to restore state funding for IVF

Poland’s largest opposition party has launched a campaign to restore government funding for in vitro fertilisation (IVF), which was ended by the ruling national-conservative Law and Justice (PiS) party after it came to power in 2015.

“The IVF procedure sounds dry, like a scientific term,” said Donald Tusk, leader of the centrist Civic Platform (PO) party while announcing the plans on Monday. “After many years, I have understood that behind these words there are not procedures, but life, love and the dreams of thousands of Polish women and men.”

In order to bring about the change, PO is supporting a citizen’s legislative initiative that would restore 500 million zloty (€105 million) in annual financing for IVF. If such initiatives receive the supporting signatures of at least 100,000 citizens then they must be considered by parliament.

“Of course, we don’t know what the fate of the bill will be when it goes to the parliament, whether this authority will decide to listen to the people or not,” said Tusk, quoted by Interia. “But I certainly will not give up.”

Although other opposition parties, such as The Left (Lewica), have also declared support for restoring state funding for IVF, the new citizen’s initiative is very unlikely to gain the support of the PiS-led majority in parliament.

In 2015, just a few weeks after coming to power, PiS moved to end the IVF financing scheme introduced by the previous PO-led government two years earlier. It claimed there was insufficient funding for the scheme, though as a party with close ties to the Catholic church it also has religious reasons for opposing IVF.

Instead, PiS sought to combat Poland’s population decline through incentives for couples to have more children, including a flagship new child benefit scheme known as “500+”. So far, however, these efforts have had little success, with Poland’s annual number of births falling to its lowest rate since World War Two.

Following the withdrawal of national state funding for IVF, a number of Polish cities under opposition control – including Warsaw, Kraków, Gdańsk, Łódź, Poznań and Częstochowa – have moved to finance IVF programmes out of their own pockets.

According to data from the Polish Gynaecological Society, the problem of infertility affects roughly 1.5 million couples in Poland, around 20% of the population of reproductive age.

“It is heartbreaking that there is a group of couples who have to give up their dreams of becoming parents because they cannot afford it,” said Tusk yesterday.

Main photo credit: Jakub Wlodek / Agencja Wyborcza.pl

Alicja Ptak

Alicja Ptak is senior editor at Notes from Poland and a multimedia journalist. She previously worked for Reuters.