Poland’s new child rights ombudsman, sworn in by parliament on Friday, has branded in-vitro fertilisation “wicked” amid UN concerns over a rollback of women’s reproductive rights under the right-wing government.
Mikolaj Pawlak, a 38-year-old specialist in canon law backed by the Law and Justice (PiS) government, stirred controversy by calling in-vitro a “wicked method from the legal-moral perspective”.
The so-called “test-tube baby” treatment involves fertilising eggs outside a woman’s body to produce embryos that can then be implanted in her womb.
The Roman Catholic church views an embryo as a conceived child and is opposed to the method which implants only a fraction of fertilised eggs.
Since coming to power in 2015 in the EU country, the church-allied PiS government party has ended public funding for in-vitro fertilisation and made the morning-after pill prescription-only.
Pawlak, who made the comments in a Senate hearing late Thursday, also criticised Poland’s abortion law, already one of Europe’s most restrictive, insisting that the Constitutional Tribunal ought to review it for “discrepancies”.
This PiS government has also attempted to tighten the devoutly Catholic country’s abortion law, which already allows terminations only if pregnancy is the result of rape or incest, the deformation of the foetus or poses a threat to the mother’s life.
One such initiative was scrapped after tens of thousands of women dressed in black protested across the country in 2016.
United Nations human rights experts on Thursday expressed concern over recent rollbacks of women’s rights in Poland, especially those regarding reproductive health.