Poland: rejection of prison sentence for in vitro fertilization
The President of parliament, Bronislaw Komorowski, announced on September 2 that the delegates would have to give their opinion during the week of September 7 on the initiative Contra in Vitro put before Parliament in mid June, which collected more than 160,000 signatures. This bill proposed that “any person whose action led to in vitro fertilization” would be liable to a prison sentence of up to three years. On September 10, the Diet, the lower house of the Polish Parliament, gave a first reading to the bill, drawn up by Catholics. It was rejected by 244 votes, with 162 in its favor, and 10 abstentions.
The Polish State has not legislated up to now on the question and finds itself confronted with categorical condemnation of in vitro fertilization by the Catholic Church. Other bills on the same subject have also been presented to Parliament, two by the liberal Civic Platform (PO) in power, one by the conservative Law and Justice Party (PIS, opposition) and one by the leftist social democrats (SLD, opposition).
The Polish bishops state that in vitro fertilization is a “kind of sophisticated form of abortion” since this practice “causes the destruction of many embryos” at each attempt. Mgr. Henryk Hoser, archbishop of Warsaw-Prague, has described the supporters of in vitro fertilization as “moral schizophrenics.” In 1989, at the fall of Communism, the Polish Catholic Church obtained a ban on abortion, punishable from that time with two years imprisonment for those who carried it out, except in cases of rape, incest or irreversible embryonic malformation. (Sources: apic/belga/afp)
