The Polish city of Łódź has funded in vitro fertilisation (IVF) treatments leading to the births of 455 children in the seven years since it stepped in to replace financing cut by the conservative national government.
The newly released figures come amid renewed debate over IVF, with the opposition pledging to restore government funding if they come to power at this year’s elections but a figure from the ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party yesterday condemning IVF as the artificial “production of children”.
Poland's largest opposition party has launched a campaign to restore government funding for IVF, which was ended by the conservative ruling party after it came to power in 2015 https://t.co/zp3Chg4Ltq
— Notes from Poland 🇵🇱 (@notesfrompoland) September 27, 2022
In 2015, just a few weeks after coming to power, PiS moved to end the IVF financing scheme introduced by the previous government two years earlier. It claimed that the programme was too expensive, but also noted that there were “fundamental ethical objections from a large part of society”.
Subsequently, a number of Poland’s largest cities – whose local authorities are in opposition hands – stepped in to provide their own funding for couples seeking IVF treatment. Among them were Warsaw, Kraków, Gdańsk, Łódź, Poznań and Częstochowa.
This week, Łódź revealed that, during the seven years its programme has been running, around 1,300 couples have received funding for IVF treatment, leading to 455 children being born.
Couples can receive subsidies of up to 5,000 zloty (€1,100) for one round of treatment, and are able to apply for up to three treatments. The city, which is Poland’s fourth largest, plans to spend 1 million zloty this year for 200 treatments.
Kraków city council has approved municipal funding for residents to receive IVF treatment.
A number of opposition-controlled cities have launched similar schemes since the conservative government ended national funding for IVF in 2016https://t.co/T6rDMJGdOq
— Notes from Poland 🇵🇱 (@notesfrompoland) March 26, 2021
By contrast, a 40 million zloty programme established by the PiS government to help couples conceive without IVF led to 209 conceptions in a 15-month period over 2021 and 2022, notes broadcaster TVN24.
Last year, the largest opposition party, Civic Platform (PO) – which had introduced state funding for IVF when it was in power in 2013 – launched a campaign to restore such financing at the national level. It is hoping to come to power as part of an opposition coalition at this year’s elections.
However, PiS – which is currently leading the polls, though without enough support to guarantee a continued parliamentary majority – remains staunchly opposed to IVF. One of its MPs, Barbara Bartuś, yesterday told parliament that IVF “is not a method of fighting infertility, it is the production of humans”.
Instead, PiS has sought to combat Poland’s population decline through incentives for couples to have more children, including its flagship child benefit scheme. So far, however, these efforts have had little success, with Poland’s birth rate – one of the lowest in Europe – continuing to fall.
The number of births in Poland last year was the lowest since WWII while the number of deaths was higher than at any time other than in 2020 and 2021.
It was the tenth year in a row in which deaths have outnumbered births https://t.co/MiCTyAPH1z
— Notes from Poland 🇵🇱 (@notesfrompoland) January 31, 2023
Main image credit: Mariusz Cieszewski/Polska.pl (under CC BY-NC 2.0)
Daniel Tilles is editor-in-chief of Notes from Poland. He has written on Polish affairs for a wide range of publications, including Foreign Policy, POLITICO Europe, EUobserver and Dziennik Gazeta Prawna.
