Women’s rights is “number one issue” in Poland, says opposition leader Tusk

Women’s rights is the “number one issue” in Poland, said Donald Tusk, leader of the largest opposition party, at a meeting in Pszczyna, the town where a pregnant woman infamously died in 2021 after being refused an abortion.

In his speech, Tusk pledged to remove Poland’s near-total ban on abortion, to ensure gender parity among candidates for his centrist Civic Platform (PO) party at this autumn’s elections, and to address the pay gap between men and women.

“I cannot imagine that today someone on the democratic side, striving for electoral success, would not recognise the issue of women’s rights as an absolute priority and the number one issue,” Tusk told the audience, which was made up of women’s groups.

The PO leader noted that Pszczyna was where a 30-year-old woman, Izabela, died in 2021 after her foetus was diagnosed with severe birth defects but doctors reportedly refused to remove it until it died naturally.

Her death prompted mass protests, with many, including Tusk, blaming the doctors’ actions on the near-total abortion ban introduced earlier that year. However, others have argued that the case was actually one of medical malpractice that had nothing to do with the new abortion rules.

Speaking this week, Tusk repeated that Izabela’s fate was “unnecessary” and “caused by heartlessness, by the dangerous idea that a woman should not decide for herself even in such a drastic situation”, reports news service Interia.

He pledged that his party will “find legal ways to annul” the constitutional court ruling that introduced the near-total abortion ban and ensure that decisions on terminating pregnancies are made solely by “the woman and the doctor”.

Tusk argued that, even if conservative President Andrzej Duda were to veto legislative attempts to soften the abortion law, his party has “prepared, just in case, executive decisions that do not require a bill to liberalise [abortion] procedures to a large extent without waiting for changes to the law”.

“Under no circumstances can we give up, even if we sometimes have a justified feeling that this government has no intention of giving an inch when it comes to women’s rights,” Tusk continued. “It’s not just about rights, often it’s about health, and in extreme cases about life.”

The PO leader argued that this year’s “elections are to a great extent a choice between good and evil – because I’m convinced that in recent years a lot of evil has been happening in Poland in every sense of the word”.

“We are talking, in a sense, about violence on the part of those who believe – just because one wears a uniform, the other a prosecutor’s gown, the third a cassock, and they are almost without exception men – that…they can use violence, literal or legal, systemic, to take away women’s rights,” he added.

“We absolutely must do everything in our power to get Poland back on the path of emerging from the darkness of the Middle Ages,” said Tusk, who declared that access to IVF, contraception, abortion up to 12 weeks, and sex education in schools are “fundamental rights”.

Tusk also stated that “it is absolutely unacceptable” that women still get paid less than men for doing the same job.

He said that he favours introducing rules, similar to those in France and Spain, that require greater pay transparency and also auditing of the gender pay gap in public institutions and state-owned firms.

The PO leader also declared that there would be gender parity among the top ten candidates on each of his party’s electoral lists at this autumn’s elections, with places on the lists alternating between men and women, reports the Polish Press Agency (PAP).

Main image credit; Grzegorz Celejewski / Agencja Wyborcza.pl

Daniel Tilles

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.