Only 107 legal abortions were carried out in Poland, a country of 40 million people, in 2021, the first year of a near-total ban on terminating pregnancies. And the majority of those are likely to have taken place in the 27 days before the new rules came into force in late January.
The new figures, published by the Rzeczpospolita newspaper, mean that 2021 saw a 90% decline in the number of abortions, which in the previous three years had averaged 1,087 annually.
The dramatic drop results from a ruling issued by Poland’s constitutional court in October 2020 and which went into force on 27 January 2021. The court, widely seen as under the influence of the conservative ruling party, found that terminating a pregnancy due to the diagnosis of a birth defect violates the constitutionally protected right to life.
Previously, such abortions had made up around 98% of all legal terminations in Poland. But as a result of the ruling, abortions are now only permitted for two reasons: if the pregnancy threatens the mother’s life or health, or if it results from a criminal act, such as rape or incest.
The figures obtained by Rzeczpospolita show that 75 of the 107 legal abortions in 2021 were performed due to the diagnosis of birth defects. That means they almost certainly took place before the ruling went into force just before midnight on 27 January, notes the newspaper.
If the ruling had been in force over the whole of 2021, only 32 abortions would have taken place, representing a 97% decline from the average of the previous three years.
Those 32 abortions were all justified by a threat to the mother’s life or health. That figure was similar to the average of 36 abortions annually for the same reason over the previous three years.
After the abortion ruling was introduced, there had been speculation that some doctors would help women obtain abortions by saying that the pregnancy threatened their mental health. But the new figures do not seem to support that idea.
Meanwhile, the data show that last year no abortions were carried out due to pregnancy resulting from a criminal act. In the previous three years, an average of just two abortions took place annually due to that reason.
Activists say that those figures point to the difficulties rape victims face in obtaining an abortion in Poland, both in terms of having to prove to prosecutors that a crime took place but also because victims are often reluctant to come forward.
That problem has recently received renewed attention amid the wave of Ukrainian refugees arriving in Poland this year, with various organisations – including the UN’s refugee agency – concerned that victims of rape during the war have found themselves unable to obtain abortions after fleeing.
Despite Poland having a relatively low number of legal abortions – even before the near-total ban – it is estimated that tens of thousands more take place outside the law. In the past that often involved visits to backstreet clinics, but nowadays it is done through abortion pills sent by post or by travelling abroad for terminations.
The anti-abortion ruling by the constitutional court has been extremely unpopular with the Polish public, prompting the biggest protests in Poland’s post-communist history.
Polling has regularly shown that a majority of the public favour either a return to the pre-ruling abortion law or even further liberalisation to allow abortion on demand, something favoured by opposition parties but opposed by the government.
Main image credit: Sabrina Gröschke/Flickr (under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
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.
