Father to sue Polish Government over school textbook criticism of IVF

A Polish man whose daughter was conceived via IVF plans to sue the education minister and an author over a passage in a new textbook.

Poland's Ministry of Education and Science announced that a new subject would be added to the curriculum this September: 'History and the Present', for which the new textbook has been written by historian and former politician Professor Wojciech Roszkowski.

The passage in the textbook does not mention IVF explicitly, but reads: 'Increasingly sophisticated methods of separating sex from love and fertility lead to treating the sphere of sex as entertainment and the sphere of fertility as human production, one might say breeding. This prompts the fundamental question: who will love the children produced in this way?'

Poland's government is currently led by the socially conservative Law and Justice party, which has close links to the Roman Catholic Church. Earlier this year, the government passed a bill to 'protect children from moral corruption' in schools, and ended a state-funded IVF programme in 2015 that had been established by the previous administration.

The passage in the textbook has caused significant controversy. A scientist resigned from a council chaired by Professor Roszkowski after the text was made public, and opposition politician Katarzyna Lubnauer expressed concern that textbooks 'should educate and not be an object of ideological indoctrination of young people.'

Kamil Mieszczankowski announced his intention to sue on Twitter: 'I will not allow my daughter to have fingers pointed at her in public school as an object of experimentation and a child unloved by her parents, so I will do everything to ensure that by the time she goes to school, this textbook will be a thing of the distant past'.

Independently, Poland's Association for Infertility Treatment and Adoption Support – Nasz Bocian – has filed an application to initiate the procedure for annulment of the Ministry's decision to allow the textbook to be used, and is also preparing to sue Professor Roszkowski.

The minister of education and science, Przemysław Czarnek, initially claimed that the passage was not about IVF but about artificial uteruses being developed in China. Subsequently, he said that the textbook fragment in question should be removed, but added that this will be at the discretion of the publisher.