LETTER FROM WARSAW
"The baby has been born! I've been waiting for this news for a long time. No, I haven't become a grandfather for the sixth time, but I feel a bit like one!" Poland's center-right Prime Minister Donald Tusk exclaimed in a short video posted January 29 on social media. "This is the first child born from our in vitro program. And it's a girl!" With this publicity stunt, the government showed its keenness to mark the promising initial results of its public funding of in vitro fertilization (IVF), which began in June.
This was one of the first measures passed by the democratic coalition as soon as it came to power in December 2023. Enthusiasm has surged rapidly: in August 2024, two months after the program's launch, clinics participating in the project began reporting that they had spent almost all the 500 million zlotys (€120 million) allocated by the government for 2024, asking for a budget extension. At that date, there were 6,700 couples participating in the program, with 166 pregnancies. By December, these figures had risen to 7,000 pregnancies for 20,000 qualifying couples.
The government is now reporting 9,200 pregnancies, and the program is being hailed as a success by representatives of the medical profession and civil society. "We've gone from nothing in terms of public care to a program of the highest world standards, often surpassing what can be done in some Western European countries," said Marta Gorna, president of the Nasz Bocian ("our stork") NGO, committed to combating fertility problems.
"With almost 20,000 births anticipated over the course of a year, this is a powerful demographic shock," she added. "We're practically talking about a 13th month in terms of births. It's considerable!" This is all in a context where a quarter of Polish couples, or 3 million people, are facing fertility problems. Like many developed countries, Poland is facing worrying demographic trends and is at the bottom of the table: the fertility rate here is 1.26 children per woman (compared with 1.79 in France) and the birth rate has fallen by 40% over the last 30 years.
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