Wielding placards that read “The revolution has a uterus” and “My body, my choice,” they poured on to the streets of Poland, defying coronavirus restrictions and sub-zero temperatures to take part in the country’s largest protests since the fall of communism.
Three years on, the battle against Poland’s draconian abortion measures has moved from the streets to the country’s legislature, in what campaigners describe as a crucial test of the country’s new government.
“Women helped the current government win,” said Kamila Ferenc of the Federation for Women and Family Planning. “There were a lot of declarations, a lot of promises.”
Anything less than liberalisation of the laws would feel as though the new government had “cheated” on the hundreds of thousands who had taken to the streets, she added. “It will be disgraceful and a disrespect towards a huge number of women in Poland.”
In the lead-up to October’s election, the Civic Coalition, led by Donald Tusk, vowed to do away with the country’s near-total ban on abortion within 100 days of being elected. As the days since his election as prime minister steadily tick down, campaigners say there has been little sign of change.
“It’s very disappointing,” said Marta Lempart of the Polish Women’s Strike, a key player in organising the mass protests. “We won these elections – it’s women and young people who won these elections.”
Three draft bills, all of them aimed at liberalising the country’s abortion laws, have so far been announced. In November, the Left party announced it would put forward two bills: one seeking to legalise abortion up to the 12th week of pregnancy and another that would decriminalise the act of assisting in abortion.
Late last month, Tusk said his party would also put forward its own draft legislation allowing abortion up to the 12th week. Both the Civic Coalition and the Left bills include provisions that allow for later-stage abortions under conditions such as a threat to the mother’s life or developmental abnormalities.
So far there is no confirmed date for the first reading of these bills in parliament, said Ferenc.
The centrist Third Way party, a junior member in the Tusk-led coalition, has reportedly been contemplating introducing legislation that would call on the country to return to Poland’s strict 1993 laws, hammered out between political leaders and the Catholic church, which governed the position until being even further tightened in 2020, said Ferenc.
The original 1993 laws, which themselves ranked among the most restrictive in Europe, allowed abortions only in the case of foetal defects, rape, incest, or if the mother’s life and health were in danger. The tightening in 2020 banned terminations in the case of foetal defects as well, setting off nationwide protests.
Despite the widespread support for abortion liberalisation among Polish society, Ferenc said it was likely that the two bills calling for abortion up to the 12th week might not be able to gather enough support in the new parliament to make it past the first reading.
“We are afraid that only this most conservative draft bill, which seeks to bring back the previous legal situation on abortion, will pass, and the rest of them will be rejected,” she said. “And that means disaster for us as women’s rights defenders.”
She put the situation down to the diverse political groupings that make up the coalition government. While the Left and the Civic Coalition have thrown their support behind reproductive rights, Tusk admitted recently that he had failed to persuaded the leaders of the Third Way, who have long voiced more conservative views on the issue.
Ferenc called on Tusk to “try harder” when it came to striking a deal with the Third Way. “That’s politics, you need to negotiate,” she said. “Especially when it comes to women’s rights and abortion rights, because the situation is serious.”
The country’s crackdown on abortion has been linked to the deaths of at least six women, as some doctors prioritise saving foetuses – either for ideological reasons or in a bid to avoid legal consequences – in what Human Rights Watch described last September as a “climate of fear that has heightened risks for women and girls”.
Things have improved somewhat since then, said Ferenc, though the near-total ban remains in place. “Doctors, practitioners and hospitals realise that now they are less under the surveillance of the prosecution office and so on, and we haven’t heard of any new case of maternal death, fortunately,” she said.
“But the threat is still pending,” she added. “It’s ongoing, so any day, anytime, it can happen.”
The struggle to secure abortion rights has been further complicated by the suggestion, floated by some members of the Third Way, that a referendum be held on the issue.
It is an idea rejected by many campaigners, including Ferenc. “We shouldn’t vote on human rights using a formula like a referendum,” she said, citing concerns that the question could easily fall prey to manipulation and disinformation campaigns. “Individuals cannot be deprived of their rights because some groups in society are against abortion.”
At the Polish Women’s Strike, a petition has been launched to demand that each of the draft abortion bills be sent to a parliamentary committee for further study, regardless of whether they gain enough support to make it past the final vote.
“Imagine – these are bills that are supported by 70% of people in Poland,” said Lempart. “So this is obviously not what we expected in a democracy – this whole ‘not now, there are more important issues’ narrative.”
Two polls published in recent days suggested that around half of the public support the proposals put forward by the Civic Coalition and The Left.
Even if the bills are backed by a majority of parliament, the question remains of whether the country’s president, Andrzej Duda, who is aligned with the rightwing former government, will sign them into law.
That uncertainty hovered over Tusk’s recent announcement that the new government had approved draft legislation to allow the purchase of the morning-after pill without a prescription for those over the age of 15, reversing a decision by the previous government. While the bill has yet to pass through parliament, if it is adopted it could still end up being vetoed by Duda.
Lempart brushed aside the concerns over Duda, whose term is up in August 2025. “There’s a risk that the president will not sign any bill. So maybe we should close parliament until August 2025?”
Instead she described the issue as a distraction, one seemingly aimed solely at derailing the push for change when it comes to abortion. “They say ‘why do you work on that, if there’s no chance that the president will sign it?’
“And the answer is, it’s a lot of work,” she said. “It will take us months, because the last legislation we had was 30 years ago, when there was no abortion pill. So we’re starting from scratch.”
