On Monday, April 19 at 7:30 p.m., an interview with Anna Krawczak, who addresses the difficult issue of caring for children who suffer the greatest harm in their biological families. Who looks after children wounded, betrayed by adults and furious because of it?

The author of the book “In Vitro. Without Fear, Without Ideology” also tackles topics usually avoided in everyday discussion. For example, that non-heteronormative people could adopt LGBT+ children and would be perfectly capable of helping them. Why? In Anna Krawczak’s view, such people have developed survival skills in a homophobic world, along with the strength, resilience and courage that come with them, because they know exactly what it means to be a victim, to experience violence and contempt, and yet to stand on their feet and reclaim their lives.

Anna Krawczak:

I really like Minister Czarnek’s statement about the family—provided that it is a safe environment for the child.

For several dozen children in biological families in Poland, it was not safe. They lost their lives.

Hania from Kłodzko was murdered by her mother’s partner and by her mother. Reports of violence were ignored.

Why is the level of sensitivity to harm suffered by children so low in Poland?

In Poland, we fetishize the biological family.

What happens in a family is governed by the Family and Guardianship Code, which dates back to the 1960s. The child is treated as the property of the mother.

The cultural context also influences court decisions.

Some children are physically injured and then suffer psychologically for many years (trauma occurs).

Adoptive parents must meet a number of criteria.

Sexual orientation has nothing to do with what kind of people or parents we are.

For some children, homosexual couples may be better parents than heterosexual couples.

On her Facebook page, Anna Krawczyk wrote:

On February 19, 2021, three-year-old Hania from Kłodzko died after being beaten to death by her mother and her partner. In less than a month, on March 10, a newborn from Szczecin, suffocated by her mother, joined murdered Hania. The woman’s two older children had already been taken away from her and were in care. Before Hania, on February 5, 2021, in Turzany, a mother receiving psychiatric treatment killed her three- and five-year-old children; on March 1, a three-year-old girl was admitted to a hospital in Olsztyn with a brain hematoma (her mother had already been convicted once of abusing her older children, and the family had a “Blue Card”). Do you understand? All of this happened within 30 days in a single year.

Anna Krawczak – a member of the Interdisciplinary Childhood Studies Team at UW, longtime chair of the Association for the Treatment of Infertility and Support of Adoption “Nasz Bocian”; a doctoral student at the Institute of Polish Culture at UW, where she is writing her doctoral dissertation on parenthood through gamete and embryo donation. Author of the book “In Vitro. Without Fear, Without Ideology”