The regulation introduced to the Polish Family and Guardianship Code by the law of 6 November 2008, which entered into force on 13 June 2009 (the newly added section “Motherhood” encompassing Articles 619 – 6116; Journal of Laws of 2008 No 220 item 1431), is entirely devoted to the hitherto ignored issue of maternal descent. The reform is primarily a somewhat preventive reaction to the expansion of assisted reproductive technology (ART), which enables a woman who is either unwilling or incapable of carrying and giving birth to a child to provide her egg for fertilisation, which is then planted into another woman’s womb. One of the major social effects of the new technique is the possible split of the natural motherly “functions”, hitherto vested in one person, between the genetic mother, who provides the egg for insemination, and the biological, or surrogate mother, who carries and bears the baby.
