Poland’s restrictive abortion law violates women’s rights, UN committee finds

Aug 27, 2024 | Law, Society

Women in Poland face severe human rights violations due to the country’s restrictive abortion law, found the UN Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) in an inquiry report published yesterday.

The committee noted that the situation of women in Poland was further aggravated after a constitutional court ruling rendered abortion in cases of significant foetal deformities illegal.

“The situation in Poland constitutes gender-based violence against women and may rise to the level of torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment,” said CEDAW deputy chair Genoveva Tisheva, as quoted in a statement from the committee.

The committee’s report follows a three-year inquiry into allegations made by NGOs focused on women’s rights that “Poland has committed grave and systematic violations of rights” by restricting access to abortion.

In March 2019, KARAT Coalition (Koalicja KARAT), the Federation for Women and Family Planning (Federacja na Rzecz Kobiet i Planowania Rodziny) and the Center for Reproductive Rights first notified CEDAW of the systemic restriction on accessing abortion in Poland.

The NGOs later supplemented their allegations in December 2019 and December 2020, indicating that aiding abortion is criminalised in Poland, with a prison sentence of up to three years, and that the availability of pregnancy termination is severely restricted.

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“CEDAW concluded that the criminalisation of assisting women in obtaining abortions, coupled with the very minimal legal exceptions and frequent practical inaccessibility of services, results in the denial of safe and legal abortion to the majority of women in Poland seeking an abortion,” the committee wrote in a statement.

It found that “Poland’s already restrictive legal framework…is further undermined by serious implementation flaws”.

These include doctors hesitating to perform legal abortions due to fears of criminal liability, as well as the “conscience clause” that allows medical professionals to refuse to provide abortions on moral or religious grounds.

The committee noted that such “restriction had reportedly contributed to several preventable deaths“.

The committee concluded that the current legislation, which forces women “to carry pregnancies to term, endangers their health and life, or subjects them to hostile and burdensome procedures”, causes “mental and physical suffering that constitutes gender-based violence against women.”

“Women’s mental anguish was exacerbated when forced to carry a non-viable foetus to term, a situation that has worsened since a 2020 Constitutional Tribunal ruling banned abortion even in cases of fatal foetal abnormalities,” noted Tisheva.

Until 2020, abortion in Poland was legal in three cases: when pregnancy threatened the life or health of the mother, when it resulted from a criminal act (such as rape or incest), or when a severe birth defect was diagnosed in the foetus.

In October 2020, the Constitutional Tribunal (TK), a body seen as being under the influence of the then-ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party, outlawed the third of those circumstances, which had previously made up over 90% of legal abortions. The ruling went into force in January 2021.

The coalition that replaced PiS in December pledged to loosen the abortion law, but has so far failed to do so as there is no consensus between its members – who range from the left to centre-right – on how a new abortion law in Poland should look.

Last week Prime Minister Donald Tusk admitted that the abortion law is unlikely to be loosened during the current parliamentary term – that is, until at least 2027.

Even if a more liberal abortion law were to be approved by parliament, President Andrzej Duda, a conservative figure and PiS ally, has vowed to veto any attempts to soften the existing law.

Main image credit: Jakub Włodek / Agencja Wyborcza.pl 

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