“I believe in God, yes,” Magda, a thirty-nine-year-old human-resources specialist living in Warsaw, told me, in May. “Maybe I’m not going to church as often as I would like.” Magda is fairly typical of many Polish young people. Even as it remains connected to the Catholic Church, Poland is coming to resemble the rest of Europe culturally; it has a growing economy, and in its larger cities, such as Warsaw and Krakow, young Poles gather in cafés and bars and meet on Tinder. (Many also work for long stretches in other European countries.) Even to the devout, the alarmist rhetoric about IVF has not proved entirely persuasive. In 2015, a leading Polish polling group, the Public Opinion Research Center, found that seventy-six per cent of Poles supported IVF for married couples, and forty-four per cent supported it for single women.

Like Irena, Magda spent most of her twenties searching for the right partner. “My mom sometimes told me, ‘You have too high standards,’ ” she recalled, laughing. “I said, ‘Mom, I could walk on my standards.’ ” At thirty-four, prompted by the difficulty a younger, married friend encountered when trying to conceive, Magda went for a fertility checkup. She was alarmed to learn that she had the biological profile of a forty-year-old. At first, she thought of freezing her eggs. She learned, though, that she was likely to produce fewer of them than a younger woman would, and that eggs can be damaged in the freezing-and-thawing process. In the end, she decided to choose a sperm donor and create embryos, which have a better chance of surviving freezing and thawing, even though such a step precluded the possibility of using the sperm of an eventual boyfriend or husband. In February, 2015, Magda’s doctor retrieved four eggs. Two were successfully fertilized. She envisioned telling her future partner about them: it was unfortunate, she’d say, that they couldn’t conceive a child together, “but I have, in the refrigerator, a couple of babies.”

After the retrieval, she and her doctor decided to freeze the embryos for a few months before transferring them, so that her body could recover from IVF’s gruelling hormonal-stimulation regime. Magda was singularly focussed on having a baby; she wasn’t paying close attention to the news, which was filled with debates on the IVF law. When her employer unexpectedly offered her a two-year contract in Krakow, Poland’s charming second city, she figured that she could keep her embryos on ice until she returned to Warsaw, where her family lives. At the end of 2016, as she was moving back to Warsaw, Magda made an appointment at her clinic. In an examination room, her doctor said that he was no longer able to help her. By then, she’d begun following media coverage of the new law; she realized that, as a single woman, she could be denied fertility care. She had never considered, however, that she might be barred from accessing her already-created embryos, which had been made from her own genetic material at a time when it was completely legal to receive treatment. “Now I can’t do anything,” she said. Ruefully, she noted that, despite having no say over their future, she still bears financial responsibility for the embryos and pays annual “rent” to the clinic where they are stored.

The experience has sharpened Magda’s political consciousness. Although she did not vote in the October, 2015 election, in which PiS won a majority in the Polish parliament—“I’m furious at myself for this,” she said—she told me that she planned to drag everyone she knew to the polls for the next parliamentary election. (The 2019 election took place this October; PiS won another majority.) She lambasted the current government for its hypocrisy regarding family issues. In 2016, at the same time it was barring single women from using IVF, the PiS-led government began paying new parents a monthly child allowance of five hundred zloty per child (around a hundred and thirty dollars) in an effort to boost Poland’s birth rate. “Everyone says, ‘Yes, it’s amazing to have babies. Make them! . . . Have five hundred zloty for a baby,’ ” Magda said. “O.K., so why can’t I do it? I’m not a pathological liar. I’m not a psycho.” Her voice rose. “I’m a normal, loving person who would like to have a family.”

Scholars use the term “selective pronatalism” to describe the adoption of social policies that encourage childbearing for some groups while discouraging it for others. Some of the lawyers and doctors I spoke to believe that, although most media coverage of the IVF law focussed on how single women would be affected, its restrictions were actually designed with queer people in mind. Queer couples in Poland can neither marry nor form civil unions; if they have children while abroad, they must hire lawyers to request citizenship for those children, and it is granted only on a case-by-case basis. Under the banner of the five-hundred-zloty program, PiS has established itself as one of Europe’s leading “pro-family” parties, inspiring similar programs in Serbia and Lithuania. In doing so, however, it has reinforced a narrow vision of what being “pro-family” means—one from which single and queer parents are excluded.

Maria, a thirty-eight-year-old designer living in Warsaw, always wanted a partner and family but never found the right person. Three years ago, she began surveying her options. She learned that, under the new law, it was impossible for her to receive fertility treatment in Poland; after several months of research and reflection, she decided to order sperm from Cryos, a Danish sperm bank, and attempt intracervical insemination (the so-called turkey-baster method) herself, at home. In an e-mail, she told me that she’d derived a sense of agency from undertaking the procedure herself. It was counterbalanced, though, by “feeling completely abandoned by your own country. . . . I realized one day that, despite being a good citizen, I don’t deserve the same rights as the rest of the society, only because I’m not married or in a legal relationship.” She added, “It pisses me [off] big time.”

Maria and I met for dinner on a warm evening this spring. Wearing jeans and a marinière, with elegantly tousled dirty-blond hair, she was in good spirits, even though her first few attempts to get pregnant hadn’t worked. She showed me photos of the canister in which the sperm samples had arrived, each in its own plastic straw; she planned to try six times, she said, after which she would travel to Denmark for IVF treatment. If she had been able to buy sperm samples in Poland, they would have cost between four and six hundred zloty—around a hundred and thirty dollars—each. The samples she chose cost around thirteen hundred dollars each, including tax and shipping.

Maria told me about “I Won’t Apologize for Giving Birth,” a book on IVF families that was published, in 2015, by Karolina Domagalska, a Polish journalist. The title captured her attitude, she said: “I’m not going to be sorry. I’m not going to be apologizing to anybody for doing what I’m doing.” It’s ironic, she thinks, that Poland’s nationalist government is compelling its women to conceive with foreign sperm. “You are sending a bunch of rich, loaded women—let’s face it—to spend a hell of a lot of money outside the country, and to where? To Denmark, which is already rich,” she said. “And we are saying, ‘Oh, we are [such a] poor country, we want our Polish citizens to buy Polish products. Well, excuse me—I’m spending forty thousand zloty on Danish products, F.Y.I.”

Shortly after PiS won its first parliamentary majority, in 2015, it packed Poland’s constitutional tribunal, which rules on whether laws are compatible with the country’s constitution, with conservative judges. In April of last year, the tribunal reviewed a case brought in October, 2015, by Adam Bodnar, Poland’s ombudsman for human rights. Bodnar had requested that the tribunal clarify whether and how the IVF law would apply to single, female patients, such as Magda and Irena, who had begun treatment before its passage. The tribunal sidestepped the question of single women’s access to IVF, arguing that it could rule only on the text of the law, not on its collateral effects. But it also cited Article 30 of Poland’s constitution, which focusses on human rights and liberties. All of those liberties, the Tribunal argued, were based on the concept of human dignity; anything less than a family with both a mother and a father would deprive the embryo of the dignity to which, as a conceived child and a Polish citizen, it was entitled.