Private Choice, Public Care—
Procreation Choices in the Discourse on Family Policy in Poland
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Jagiellonian University
Publication date: 2025-06-10
Polish Sociological Review 2025;230(2)
KEYWORDS
ABSTRACT
For the purposes of this article, I looked at which private choices concerning family life are supported and
which are negated in the public discourse on family policy. The lack of a publicly published report summarizing
the changes in family policy in recent years has contributed to the use of reports written by the opposing ruling
camps in 2015 and 2017. Especially in the case of the Law and Justice report, the discourse on choice is based
on the responsibility of parents to meet the needs of their children with little interference from the state. This is
in line with the idea of familialism, which puts the family at the center of interest of politics as an entity entitled
to various types of services, and supports the caring functions of the family/woman at the expense of formalized
and institutional care.
FUNDING
The first translation of this article was funded from the resources of the research project Constructing the Meanings of Family in Discourses on Family Policy in Poland (K/DSC/005608), conducted at the Faculty of Philosophy of Jagiellonian University in Kraków.