In the year since Poland’s constitutional court introduced a near-total ban on abortion, the number of legally conducted terminations has fallen by an estimated 65%. Meanwhile, there has been a boom in “abortion tourism”, with women seeking to obtain abortions abroad.
On 22 October 2020, the Constitutional Tribunal ruled that abortions carried out due to the diagnosis of a severe birth defect in the foetus – which had previously been permitted and made up over 90% of legal terminations in Poland – were unconstitutional.
The ruling only formally came into force in January. But even in November and December, doctors and activists reported a “chilling effect”, with hospitals cancelling planned abortion procedures and refusing to schedule new ones.
Official data on the number of abortions carried out this year will not be available until mid-2022. But figures from the National Health Fund (NFZ) – which finances public healthcare in Poland – show that by August the number of induced miscarriages – which are mostly abortions – was 65% lower than in the same period of 2020, reports Dziennik Gazeta Prawna.
One reason why the drop has not been larger, notes the newspaper, is that some women diagnosed with foetal defects have said that going through with the pregnancy would severely harm their mental health, which can be grounds for obtaining a legal abortion.
The number of legal terminations in Poland even before the court ruling was already relatively low – at around 1,000 per year – given that the country had one of Europe’s strictest abortion laws.
But women’s rights groups estimated that tens of thousands more abortions were obtained by women either illegally in Poland or by travelling abroad for procedures.
Women Help Women, an international organisation that sends abortion pills by mail, says that in the space of 12 months it has assisted 18,000 women in Poland.
Abortion Without Borders, a collective of groups that help women obtain terminations, says that it has given assistance to 34,000 people in Poland since the constitutional court’s ruling. Over 1,000 of those have received second-trimester abortions in foreign clinics, reports OKO.press.
Last month, Belgium’s government donated an initial €10,000 to Abortion Without Borders for the purpose of helping women in Poland obtain abortions.
“Access to abortion is a fundamental right that every democratic state must ensure,” said the Belgian secretary of state for gender equality, equal opportunity and diversity. “When the state fails to protect its citizens, civil society must step in.”
The Polish government and ruling national-conservative Law and Justice (PiS) party, which supported the near-total abortion ban, have pushed back against the trend for women to find ways to circumvent it.
Earlier this year, the Polish embassy in Prague requested that the Czech government intervene to prevent legislation that would make it easier for women from Poland to obtain abortions in the neighbouring country.
PiS MP Barbara Bartuś, who is deputy chair of the party’s parliamentary caucus, told Dziennik Gazeta Prawna that organisations which help women obtain abortions abroad should be prosecuted.
“This is encouraging crime, murder,” she said. “Even if a child dies a few hours after birth, a more humane solution [than abortion] is to bury it with dignity.”
Her remarks echo those made by PiS chairman Jarosław Kaczyński, who promised in 2016 “to strive so that even in cases where there is a very difficult pregnancy, when the child will inevitably die, when it is severely deformed, it will end in birth, so the child can be christened, buried and given a name”.
The Constitutional Tribunal – whose chief justice is a close associate of Kaczyński – is widely seen as being under the influence of PiS. Its abortion ruling came in response to a request by 119 members of parliament, mainly from PiS.
Opinion polls show that a large majority of the Polish public – and in particular women – are opposed to the ruling, which triggered the largest protests seen in Poland’s post-communist history.
Main image credit: Jakub Wlodek / Agencja Gazeta
Daniel Tilles is editor-in-chief of Notes from Poland. He has written on Polish affairs for a wide range of publications, including Foreign Policy, POLITICO Europe, EUobserver and Dziennik Gazeta Prawna.
