Jestem Polka - Poland Proposes Reimbursement for IVF Treatments
This is excerpted from this week’s Polish Market Review:
Poland’s new health minister, Ewa Kopacz, is in favour of in-vitro fertilisation being reimbursed from the country’s budget. As many as one million Polish couples suffer from infertility, but only 3,500 a year are able to afford the artificial fertilisation procedure.
According to Ms Kopacz, in the initial stage, reimbursement would cover the cost of medical treatment for the poorest Poles. It is estimated that if in-vitro fertilisation were reimbursed, between 25,000 and 28,000 procedures could be performed each year.
Infertility is recognised by the World Health Organisation (WHO) as a social disease, as about 25% of couples across the world have problems conceiving. In-vitro treatment is reimbursed in the Czech Republic, Hungary and also in France, where the state finances three attempts at in-vitro fertilisation, as the success rate of the procedure runs at about 40%.
The method meets with major objections from the Catholic Church in Poland, which considers it unethical.
This is amazing news considering the religious bent of over 90% of Poles and the conservative mindsets of most. I can say this because I lived there for two years. I was there in the late 90s (not that long ago) when a good friend (American) was seriously contemplating helping other friends (Polish) form a Planned Parenthood office in Warsaw and was strongly (I mean, strongly) dissuaded. This is the same friend who almost lost her teaching job for consulting (consoling) a young teenage student who had become pregnant. She made the mistake of mentioning other options, like adoption and abortion. And that kind of news spreads fast in a tiny village.
For a country that is pretty darn repressive when it comes to female reproductive rights to consider reimbursement for IVF treatments makes me wonder what the hell it will take to bring the U.S. into the 21st century.
And what, exactly, is a “social disease”? How is that different from a diagnosable medical condition? Why does that term make me feel dirty? Doing a search on the World Health Organization website for “infertility” led me to broken links and missing pages. Checking the standard online sources led me to this definition:
- A sexually transmitted disease; a venereal disease.
- A disease having its highest incidence among socioeconomic groups predisposed to it by a given set of adverse living or working conditions
Which doesn’t seem entirely accurate to me. While adverse living and working conditions can contribute to the condition, it hardly feels right to clump infertility right in there with genital herpes and the clap. Jeez.
Tags: , ewa kopacz, feminism, finances, government, infertility, IVF, poland, reproductive rights, social disease, trying to have a baby, womens health, world health organization
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