Naming “In Vitro Fertilization”: Critical Discourse Analysis of the Polish Catholic Church's Official Documents

The aim of this study is to analyze the discourse about in vitro fertilization (IVF) in the official statements of the Polish Catholic Church. IVF has recently become a publicly discussed subject due to parliamentary debate beginning in April 2012 concerning different projects connected with bioethics bills. One of the important voices in this public debate was the Polish Catholic Church expressed by both individual priests and the Commission of the Polish Episcopate (CPE) along with its subordinate organizations in their official statements. These official statements form a corpus compiled especially for this study, and the contents have been subjected to close scrutiny. The analysis was conducted in the critical discourse analysis (CDA) paradigm with the use of both quantitative and qualitative methods. The main research question concerns the discursive construction of IVF through the way it is named and expressed. A combination of quantitative and qualitative corpus methods revealed the discursive construction of IVF as inhuman and associated with biological experiments conducted in a laboratory rather than with a birth of a child which is consistent with the overall negative attitude of the Polish Catholic Church against IVF expressed in Polish mass-media.