‘This is war right now’: Thousands take to the streets in Poland to protest tightening of abortion laws

Open this photo in gallery:

Krystyna Kacpura can barely contain her anger as she talks about the protests that have swept across Poland in response to a move to tighten the country’s already strict abortion law.

“This is war right now,” said Ms. Kacpura, the executive director of Poland’s Federation for Women and Family Planning. “We’ll not stop.”

Thousands of people have taken to the streets in cities, towns and villages throughout the country ever since its Constitutional Tribunal struck down a key part of the abortion law last Thursday. The tribunal’s decision will effectively ban almost all abortions in Poland.

The ruling has struck a nerve in this predominantly Catholic country where the populist Law and Justice government has long supported a ban. While few Poles back abortion on demand, there’s a growing sense that the tribunal has gone too far.

In defiance of pandemic restrictions, demonstrators have held noisy marches, blocked traffic and staged sit-ins in churches. Many carried placards emblazoned with red lightning bolts and the slogan “Women’s hell.” The backlash intensified Wednesday when people were urged to stage a national strike and stay away from work and school in support of the protests.

“I think this is a game changer,” said Barbara Nowacka, a long-time abortion rights activist and MP for the biggest opposition party, Civic Coalition. “We haven’t seen protests like this. You have on the streets hundreds of thousands of people everywhere, and they are shouting for freedom.”

Polish law permits abortions only in cases of rape or incest, where the mother’s life is at risk or if the fetus has severe abnormalities. As a result, only about 1,000 hospital abortions are performed annually, and the vast majority involve situations where the fetus is deformed or badly damaged. Abortion-rights campaigners estimate that every year as many as 150,000 women have abortions illegally in Poland or go abroad.

The 13-member tribunal narrowed the law by ruling that abortions for fetal abnormalities violated the constitution. It accepted arguments from pro-life campaigners that the exemption allowed for “eugenic abortions,” in which terminations were carried out where, for instance, Down syndrome had been detected. The tribunal’s president, Julia Przylebska, said the law legalized “eugenic practices with regard to an unborn child, thus denying it the respect and protection of human dignity.” She added that it also amounted to “a directly forbidden form of discrimination.”

Abortion-rights campaigners argued that the ruling will lead to more illegal abortions and force women to deliver babies who are brain dead or have no chance of survival.

This isn’t the first time Poland has grappled with the issue of abortion, but the debate has become more heated as attitudes toward social issues change.

Much as in Ireland, which only recently liberalized its abortion law, the Catholic Church has played an enormous role in Polish life. The church was instrumental in bringing down communism in the late 1980s and has shaped much of the country’s social agenda ever since.

During the Communist era abortion was widespread, with an estimated 500,000 procedures carried out annually. After Poland broke from the Soviet Union in 1989, bishops pushed to limit access to abortion, and the current law was enacted in 1993. An attempt to liberalize it in 1996 failed.

Since taking power in 2015, Law and Justice has steered Poland sharply to the right with a platform that promotes tradition and Catholic values. The government has made a couple of attempts to ban abortions altogether but backed off in the face of public opposition.

Last year 119 MPs from Law and Justice and other conservative parties asked the tribunal to intervene. The tribunal’s role is to ensure that all laws passed by parliament comply with the constitution, but critics, including European Union officials, have contended that it has been stacked with Law and Justice cronies.

The government has rejected criticism of the tribunal and welcomed the ruling. “In order to have the freedom of choice you first must be alive,” Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki said this week. He added that “the situations that we are seeing in the streets, and which amount to acts of aggression, vandalism, attacks, are absolutely inadmissible, should not be taking place at all.” Law and Justice Leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski has gone further and accused protesters of seeking to “destroy Poland.”

But the government has clearly been caught off guard by the outcry, which has expanded to include farmers, coal miners, taxi drivers, teachers and health care workers. A recent poll found that 73 per cent of those surveyed did not support the tribunal’s ruling and only 11 per cent backed a total ban.

Klementyna Suchanow, an author and activist, said the protests posed a serious challenge to the government and illustrated shifting attitudes toward the church, particularly among young people. “I would even say we should stop using the word ‘protest’ because it looks right now like a revolution,” Ms. Suchanow said Wednesday as she took a break from a march in Warsaw. “I feel this is really unstoppable.”