The Polish Episcopate does not hide its discontent with Prime Minister
Donald Tusk's pledge that in vitro fertilisation (IVF) procedures will be partly refunded by the state.
'At this stage of experiments and knowledge there is no slightest doubt that IVF violates the right to live of conceived persons. At the price of one life, to give parents pleasure and give them a child, another one is killed,' said Archbishop Józef Michalik, chairman of the Polish Episcopate Conference.
And he added that IVF was 'unacceptable for any honest person, let alone a Christian with a developed conscience.'
The IVF question was discussed at the Episcopate's plenary session at the Jasna Góra monastery in Częstochowa yesterday. The hierarchs' comments are a continuation of the Polish Catholic Church's protestations against the infertility-treating procedure. Last year, following Health Minister
Ewa Kopacz's statement that the government was planning to refund IVF, the Episcopate's Council for Family called IVF in a letter to members of parliament a 'kind of sophisticated murder.'
After the close of yesterday's session, Archbishop Henryk Hoser, the bishop ordinary for Warszawa-Praga and the head of the Episcopate's bioethical expert team, said 'The Church does not accept out-of-body procreation, instead recommending alternative options, that is, infertility diagnosis and therapy.'
He also said that, 'IVF does not cure infertility. The couple remain infertile.' According to Mr Hoser, the IVF method is 'not very efficient,' and creating surplus embryos is 'unacceptable from the ethical point of view as it amounts to a destruction of human life.'
Bishop Bronisław Dembowski, in turn, clearly alluding to IVF, lamented over the 'paradox of our times where, on the one hand, there is fight for allowing women to have abortions, to use contraception, while on the other there are attempts to replace God with some obscure methods.'
More restrained was the Warsaw metropolitan bishop, Archbishop
Kazimierz Nycz, who refused to comment on the Prime Minister's pledge on the grounds that he did not yet know the final report of the government's bioethical expert team.
In December,
Jarosław Gowin, PO senator and head of the team, is set to present his version of an IVF bill. It will become clear then whether the Church's main reservation has been taken into consideration: a ban on creating and storing surplus embryos, and whether IVF is to be available to all couples or to married ones only.
The idea that IVF procedures should be refunded with taxpayers' money has not found favour with the President either. 'This is introducing another controversial issue that is supposed to divide the public. I understand the Church's position because it has been highly consistent,'
Lech Kaczyński commented yesterday.
translated by Marcin Wawrzyńczak
