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Demonstration against tightening the abortion law: the country is divided
Photo: NurPhoto / Getty Images
In Poland tens of thousands of people have been taking to the streets for days to demonstrate against the tightening of the abortion law.
The legal situation for pregnant women in Poland was already extremely bad and abortions were only allowed in very few exceptional cases.
The country's highest court has now made it possible to change the law, according to which a pregnancy cannot be terminated even if the fetus has severe malformations.
So even if it is clear that there is no viable human growing up in the uterus, the birth must take place.
According to the judgment, "life" must be protected "at every stage of development", even if that means that a dead child must be born.
Margarete Stokowski, arrow to the right
Photo:
Rosanna Graf
Born in 1986, was born in Poland and grew up in Berlin.
She studied philosophy and social sciences and has been working as a freelance writer since 2009.
Her feminist bestseller "Unterrum frei" was published in 2016 by Rowohlt Verlag.
In 2018 "The Last Days of Patriarchy" followed, a collection of columns from SPIEGEL ONLINE and "taz".
This means that the only cases in which Polish pregnant women are legally allowed to have abortions would be those in which the pregnant woman's life is threatened by pregnancy, as well as rape or incest.
However, Kaja Godek, the leader of the Polish "Pro-Life" movement and initiator of the citizens' initiative that led to the current tightening, has already stated that she is confident that abortion will be banned in the future even if rape.
One of the protesters' slogan now reads: "This is a war".
Various organizations are calling for women's strikes, for protest actions in churches, for blockades.
It would now be very easy to look at Poland from Germany and say: Yes, Poland.
Extremely Catholic, always a little behind, and so on.
However, one should not forget that abortion is still not legalized in Germany, that misogynist protests take place in front of gynecological practices and that information about abortion as "advertising for abortion" can be prosecuted as if it were propaganda and not basic health care .
We are only on the way to equality
With its almost complete ban on abortion, Poland is not a bizarre special case of a somewhat eccentric, retrograde Catholic country, but an example of where the journey in the middle of Europe can go when right-wing Christian fundamentalists are in power.
The country is extremely divided, as was last seen in the presidential election in the summer, in which the incumbent Duda, supported by the nationalist ruling party PiS, won a runoff election with 51 to 49 percent of the votes against his challenger.
There are very many progressive people in Poland, but so far there have not been enough to vote the government out.
It is no secret that the extreme curtailment of pregnant women’s rights in Poland has to do with the fact that it is a very Catholic country.
"Catholic" can also be replaced by "Christian" here, because opposition to abortion is not an exclusively Catholic phenomenon; there are also Protestant anti-abortionists.
Christian hardliners are often referred to as "conservative" rather than "religious fundamentalist", and that is not wrong, but neither is the whole picture.
Conservatives are not strictly religious.
But the combination of religiosity, conservative views and political power means: it looks bad, really bad, for the rights of women and minorities such as transgender people.
Even so, hardly anyone speaks of "political Christianity" while the phrase "political Islam" is used again and again.
Why?
"Political Christianity" is not a happily chosen term, of course, also because "Christianity" does not exist, and "political Islam" is also misleading for the same reasons, but: "political Islam" is a common formulation.
It is not at all the case that those who criticize the restriction of women's rights do not often have both in mind in principle, at least in theory: Christian and Islamic fundamentalists.
Alice Schwarzer, for example, is one of those people who likes to criticize "political Islam" and describe it as a central threat to women's rights.
Nevertheless, in her new book "Lebenswerk", she also writes in part about violence against women from the Christian side.
For example, at one point in her book she lists how many women are raped in Germany, how many experience violence in relationships and how many women are killed by their partners or ex-partners and writes: "Only every twelfth victim of (sexual ) Violence reports. And we are not talking about refugees, migrants or Islamism. This epidemic, structural male violence in our Christian democracy is homemade. It is the dark secret at the heart of the power balance between the sexes. "
As an explanation for the difference between "our everyday violence" and "the public orgies of violence in the name of Allah" she sees "the legitimacy of violence in the patriarchal countries of origin of the perpetrators, they know no women's movement and no equality".
But, and of course Schwarzer actually knows that: Germany is also a patriarchal country of origin.
"We" don't know any equality either, "we" are just, maybe, on the way there.
Abortion opponents in particular are often right-wing and Christian and justify their demands for stricter bans with religious ideas.
The struggle of Christian fundamentalists against the rights of women, pregnant women, queer people is not something that naturally arises from the relationship between the sexes.
But when it comes to Christian actors, religious motivation often takes a back seat in the debate.
Google found 66,800 results for the formulation "political Islam" and 857 for "political Christianity". While "the Left" in Germany has to be accused of keeping silent about Islamism - which it does not -, the Christian aspect is at the same time in public debates Often left almost unnoticed by right-wing and radical right-wing struggles against women's rights.
Liane Bednarz recently wrote in a guest article here in SPIEGEL that it was "bizarre" when right-wing thinking was "charged" in a Christian way.
The link is not that unusual.
Abortion opponents in particular are often right-wing and Christian and justify their demands for stricter bans with religious ideas.
The fact that inhumane acts are advocated in courts by lawyers on Christian grounds is not something that only happens in Poland.
Only recently, a public prosecutor in Oldenburg demanded a mild sentence for a father who beat his children for years - and justified this with quotes from the Bible: "Whoever loves his child, chastise it," the public prosecutor quoted his so-called God.
He was widely criticized for this.
The case also shows, however, that Christian motivated attempts to return to the past are not as far away in Germany as one might think.
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