Warsaw Equality Parade, June 2022, with the Palace of Culture and Science visible in the background
Can existence be resistance? In Poland queer parenthood remains largely unthinkable and care within rainbow families illegitimate – yet for many it is a lived reality. What does it mean to care, parent, and sustain kinship under conditions of state-mandated non-existence? And how can such familial care practices be read as political resistance?
In the heat of the 2020 Presidential Campaign in Poland, the – soon to be re-elected – President Andrzej Duda proudly announced at one of his rallies that LGBT are not people, but an ideology. This claim came at the peak of the PiS (or Law and Justice) party’s hateful campaign against the queer community and LGBTQ rights, one that they have been waging for years as part of a broader offensive against ‘gender ideology’. At the time, almost a third of Polish territory was declared an ‘LGBT ideology free zone’ by local municipalities, Polish national TV was airing homophobic materials in prime time, and the ruling party vilified LGBTQ people as a threat to children, ‘regular’ families, and the Polish nation. Even though Poland never offered LGBTQ people much legal protection, since PiS came to power in 2015, Poland dropped in measures of inclusivity by several percentage points and landed last amongst EU countries in ILGA Europe’s Rainbow Map Index for several years. All of this was despite growing social acceptance and support for LGBTQ people and their rights.
The 2023 Parliamentary elections, which brought an end to PiS’s majoritarian government, were expected to also offer some relief to the Polish LGBTQ community and same-sex couples in particular. All three parties forming the new ruling coalition promised, in one way or another, to introduce civil partnerships once in government. Donald Tusk – the leader of the biggest coalition party – even put it among his 100 priorities for the cabinet’s first 100 days. Fast forward to two years later, in January of 2026, and it is clear that campaign promises were overly optimistic. After months of negotiations behind closed doors, the government has presented a bill on ‘the status of a close person in a relationship and in a cohabitation agreement.’ The proposed policy is stripped not only of the civil partnership status but also of many necessary protections – among them, perhaps most importantly, the right to second-parent adoption. In fact, family rights and queer parenthood were a key bone of contention amongst the ruling parties, with the Polish People’s Party (PSL) blocking any possibility of legally sanctioning parental rights for same-sex couples.
Pride materials behind a protective mesh in Tarnów, Poland. Credit: AS Photo Family – stock.adobe.com
In his 2024 paper, the academic Marcin Smietana interprets the complete inconceivability of queer people having children as reflecting a sense of their ‘unreproductive citizenship’. He argues that state-mandated homophobia, social prejudices, and a lack of legal regulations or structural support constitute a eugenicist politics of ‘social sterilisation’ for LGBTQ people in Poland. His line of argument is useful in explaining the significant barriers that prevent many Polish queer couples from having children and is particularly fitting when applied to cis gay men, who admittedly have limited reproductive choices. Yet when confronted with the reality, the ‘social sterilisation’ hypothesis does not hold – despite the stigma, lack of legal recognition, and institutional support, many Polish queer couples do have children.
Official statistics documenting the phenomenon do not exist, research is still scarce, and existing datasets, such as that of the Rodziny z Wyboru w Polsce (Chosen Families in Poland) project, are somewhat outdated. Yet, based on available data and their own research, key LGBTQ NGOs estimate that there could be as many as 50,000 LGBTQ families in Poland. These include both couples raising children that were conceived in previous relationships and those that decided to have biological or adoptive children together. Indeed, these families most often consist of two cis women and their children, and they cannot be called rare. So what happens if we shift focus from barriers and their ‘sterilising’ effects and instead centre the practices that overcome them, and claim reproductive citizenship not as a set of rights but as a lived reality?
Marta Rawłuszko and Magdalena Grabowska introduce the concept of ‘illegitimate care’, an idea alluded to here and set to be developed in an upcoming paper. Illegitimate care refers to care and reproductive activities, necessary to sustain human life and protect health or well-being, that are ‘constructed as undesirable, dangerous, immoral or illegal’ and as such unsupported, ignored, or worse, criminalised by the state. In their analysis they focus on abortion and humanitarian activism in Poland, demonstrating how care practices can be carriers of political resistance and expand contention beyond mass protests and public advocacy. What if we stretch this idea even further into practices that take place within relationships that are familial, despite not being recognised as such, and which include necessary care activities that emerge because of and despite state hostility and a lack of institutional support?
When reading through the ‘illegitimate care’ framework, the everyday banal practices of care provided by queer parents to their children open up new ways of thinking about political contestation. Their doing of reproductive citizenship, despite apparent efforts to ‘socially sterilise’ them, should be read not only as a private matter, but a political act of resistance. Joanna Mizielińska’s research suggests that queer parents in Poland are experts at navigating legal and social loopholes in search for recognition and security. Their regular interactions with schools or healthcare providers are battlefields for scraps of legitimacy that the state fails to provide. In the search for information and know-how they often find community and networks that foster resilience and hope, while helping to realise dreams of parenthood. Seen as ‘illegitimate care’, these strategies and daily practices are transformed into political acts of resistance against systems of oppression that deem LGBTQ parents to be unthinkable.
This perspective invites us to look beyond formal politics and public mobilisation and consider how the care provided within familial relationships challenges dominant norms of family, citizenship, and belonging. Taking this seriously calls for more research that treats intimate practices as political spaces, and particularly for further attention to queer families which, across contexts, question existing systems of oppression simply by existing.
Author: Julia Pałejko, University of Amsterdam. 23rd February 2026