“We can’t say this came from nowhere. We knew something was happening, but people were thinking, they just want to scare us, they can’t actually do this. But they did,” said Natalia Woznik, a 25-year-old student who has taken to the streets in Cieszyn, southern Poland, every day since Oct. 22, when the right-wing government announced a near-total ban on abortion. “The majority of politicians are men, and they are saying all this bullshit about what women should do—sit in the kitchen, cooking and taking care of children. They are saying it’s in the Bible. And my generation, we are fighting with these radicals. Come on, it’s the 21st century! We are in Europe. We are in the European Union and it’s like the Middle Ages here, sometimes.”
While the ruling caught some Poles by surprise, it was less of a shock to the Trump administration—or to a string of hard-line Islamic leaders across the Middle East and Africa. On the same day that President Andrzej Duda’s government made its announcement, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo unveiled the Geneva Consensus Declaration, signed by 35 countries, including Poland. Valerie Huber, the U.S. Health Department Special Representative for Global Women’s Health, called it an “historic event.” It was the first time in history that the governments of the United States, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Brazil, Hungary, Poland, Pakistan, and South Sudan had described themselves as “like-minded” on the subject of women’s roles and rights—and it’s one of the achievements that Trump and his staff pointed to on their way out the door.
