Polish gynaecologist’s patients launch legal action after authorities seize medical records

Patients of a gynaecologist whose records were seized as part of an investigation into the alleged aiding of abortion have announced that they are taking legal action, including at the European Court of Human Rights. They argue that their rights have been violated through “institutional violence”.

The incident comes amid ongoing tensions in Poland over women’s reproductive rights under a conservative government that has supported the introduction in 2021 of a near-total ban on abortion and has restricted access to contraception.

On 9 January this year, agents from the Central Anticorruption Bureau (CBA) raided the private medical practice of Maria Kubisa, a gynaecologist in the city of Szczecin. They did so on the orders of prosecutors investigating the alleged aiding of abortion with the use of a pharmacological agent.

Under Polish law, assisting an abortion is a crime punishable by up to three years in prison. In a separate case, one women’s rights activist is currently on trial for providing a pregnant woman with abortion pills.

Although prosecutors had only demanded the files of one of Kubisa’s patients, the agents seized the files of all patients dating back to 1996, reports TOK FM.

Moreover, although in such cases prosecutors are expected to make copies of documentation as quickly as possible before returning it, in this case they held the files for almost two months, only returning them after patients publicised the issue in the media, notes the Gazeta Wyborcza daily.

Kubisa herself has not been summoned for questioning nor charged with any crime. She told news website OKO.press that she “does not sell any [abortion] pills and does not help with abortions” in any way in Poland. “Everything I do is legal.”

Indeed, she says that she stopped treating pregnant patients in Poland after the 2020 constitutional court ruling that introduced a near-total ban on abortion. She says “her medical conscience won’t allow” her to tell women whose foetuses have severe birth defects that they “have to carry this pregnancy to term”.

She continues, however, to treat some Polish patients just over the border from Szczecin in Germany, where she is also a practicing doctor and where abortion on demand is legal.

She works “in accordance with German law, to which I am subject there”, says the doctor. “The Polish women I treat in [the German city of] Prenzlau are not even patients from my practice in Poland.”

Kubisa told TOK FM that, since the 2020 abortion ruling, she has faced “harassment” from the authorities in Poland. Her offices have been searched by police and the CBA in the past, though they found no evidence of wrongdoing.

Now a group of her patients have filed a complaint to prosecutors over the seizure of their records. They have announced they will also appeal to Poland’s commissioners for human rights and patients’ rights and to the Office for Data Protection

“Finally, after consulting lawyers, we have decided that complaints will also be filed with the European Court of Human Rights,” says Bogna Czałczyńska, the regional commissioner for women and equal treatment, who has been supporting their case.

“The limits of the law have been crossed,” Czałczyńska told Gazeta Wyborcza. “A citizen cannot feel threatened by institutional violence on the part of their own state.”

Agnieszka Stach, a lawyer representing the patients whose records were seized by the CBA, told TOK FM, that neither she nor the patients have received “any specific information from the authorities regarding the investigation” and are forced to learn about everything from the media.

“The public prosecutor’s office has not informed the individual patients that documentation with their sensitive data has been seized. Nor do the women know whether these documents have been processed by the prosecution service for archiving,” added Stach.

She acknowledged that law enforcement agencies have the right, with a court’s permission, to seize documentation, but added that this right is not “unlimited”.

Kubisa’s patients are also planning to stage a demonstration in support of their doctor on 8 March, which is International Women’s Day. “She is always on our side. She fights for our health and our lives. Now we have to show that we are with her,” one of them told Gazeta Wyborcza.

Main photo credit: Karolina Grabowska / pexels.com

Alicja Ptak

Alicja Ptak is senior editor at Notes from Poland and a multimedia journalist. She previously worked for Reuters.