October 31, 2020

A ban in Poland will make abortions less accessible and less safe

topic:	Abortion
located:	Poland
editor:	Katarina Panić

Last Monday evening in Warsaw, a woman naked from the waist up stood on the roof of the car, the crowd surrounding her. She had a yellow smoke torch in one hand. In another, she put the middle finger up. A few feet to her left, another woman stands on the top of the car with a red smoke torch in one hand, and the black flag in another. The lightning strike on the flag is the symbol of Poland's protests over the tightening of abortion laws. Two days later, Belgian newspaper De Standaard published the picture and the story titled "Do you have a uterus? No? Piss off and get back to your church."

The Women's Strike has been taking place all over Poland ever since the Constitutional Tribunal ruled that abortions for foetal abnormalities are unconstitutional on October 22. The top court just managed to do what ruling Law and Justice party has tried repeatedly and failed in the Parliament over the last five years: to abolish the most common reason for abortion. From now on, it is allowed only in case of incest, rape or a threat to a woman's health.

"Restricting abortions doesn't stop abortions. It just makes them less safe. The only thing this disastrous ruling will do is put more lives at risk," Amnesty International stated.

Wroclaw-based journalist Natalia Žaba reminds that Poland had one of the most liberal abortion laws during the communist era and one of the strictest ones after the transition, adopted in 1993.

"It was never a matter of privacy. It has always been about politics and the church. The Poles are very religious and very grateful for the church's role in the overthrowing of communism. However, the Catholic church in Poland is in deep crisis these days. People are moving away from it. Both men and women are furious," Natalia told FairPlanet.

She warns that the newest pro-choice protests in Poland had overshadowed other harmful news that appeared on the day of the high court's ban. The Polish government signed an anti-abortion Geneva Consensus Declaration with a group of about 30, mostly authoritarian governments, that joined the US campaign to reorient its foreign policy in a more socially conservative direction.

"Besides Poland, only Hungary and Belarus among European countries signed this declaration. So, it is clear where are we now," Natalia concluded.

Image by Łódzkie Dziewuchy Dziewuchom, CC BY-SA 4.0

Call to Action

Stand up for women’s universal right to a safe abortion

Support now