Donald Tusk's Poland is trying to get back on the social front, after the setbacks of eight years of conservative government, trying to pass a law that provides a broad right to abortion and to loosen restrictions on the morning-after pill.
"We are ready to present in the next few hours" this text which authorizes "legal and safe abortion up to the 12th week of pregnancy", declared the prime minister after also announcing a bill which opens access to the "pill of the day after" starting from the age of 15.
But the road promises to be uphill for the pro-European coalition that came to power in the October elections, which during the election campaign promised, among other things, the liberalization of legislation on abortion and has already restored public funding for in vitro fertilization.
In fact, if two of the three political groups of the coalition - the Left and the Civic Coalition led by Tusk - have in their programs the almost total easing of the constraints on terminating the pregnancy, the third member of the coalition, the Christian Democrats of Third Way, opposes the idea of a broad liberalization of the right to abortion in a country with a strong Catholic tradition in which the rules that regulate it are among the most restrictive in Europe.
This grouping, made up of the Polonia 2050 party of the president of the Lower House of Parliament, Szymon Holownia, and the peasant party PSL, proposes "a return to the old law" of 1993, which provided for a very limited right to abortion although not as 'current.
The battle in parliament over the new legislation is therefore expected to be tough and also risks being blocked by the right of veto of the clerical-conservative president Andrzej Duda.
Currently, termination of pregnancy is only permitted in cases of rape, incest and when the mother's health or life is in danger.
In 2020, the Constitutional Court also sided with the populist national government by declaring abortion "unconstitutional" for fetal malformations even if serious or incurable and provoking the indignant reaction of thousands of women who took to the streets across the country.
In December the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) had condemned Warsaw for "violation of the right to respect for private life", after a young woman had been denied access to abortion precisely on the basis of "the existence of fetal anomalies".
At the moment the vote in Parliament has not been scheduled, but women's rights groups have called on legislators to act quickly as tens of thousands of people terminate pregnancies at home,
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