Poland backs down

Demonstration in Warsaw against the latest reform of the abortion law that makes it illegal to interrupt pregnancy in the event of a malformation of the fetus.

/ Europa Press

The rights of women have just suffered a new and serious setback in Poland.

This country already had one of the most restrictive abortion laws in Europe, behind Malta, Andorra and San Marino, which do not allow it in any case.

The Polish Family Planning Law of 1993 only allowed to interrupt the pregnancy in very limited cases: rape or incest, danger to the mother's life and malformation of the fetus.

The country's Constitutional Court has now just issued a ruling declaring the third assumption unconstitutional.

It alleges that allowing the abortion of a fetus with malformations implies legalizing eugenic practices.

And he maintains that making the right to life of a child depend on his health constitutes discrimination, thus aligning himself with the theses of anti-abortion groups that consider that the fetus is a legal person from the moment of conception and that its life it must be preserved above the rights of the mother.

The Constitutional ruling outlaws 97% of the barely 1,100 abortions that are legally performed in Poland each year.

These women will now be forced to join the huge contingent of citizens who have to travel abroad to interrupt a problematic or unwanted pregnancy, or risk a clandestine abortion that involves great health and criminal risks.

Thus continues the offensive that the ruling party, the ultra-conservative Law and Justice (PiS), has launched against civil rights and freedoms.

The Constitutional ruling has occurred at the request of 119 deputies, many of whom also propose that Poland withdraw from the Istanbul Convention, the convention that obliges the adhering countries to prevent and fight against sexist violence.

The sentence is the result of a government strategy that not only ignores the reproductive rights of women but, by action or omission, contributes to perpetuate the conditions of submission, depriving them of the freedoms and basic rights enjoyed by the rest of the women. European.

This new setback is the result of the authoritarian drift promoted by Justice and Freedom, which is violating the rule of law in order to impose its ultra-conservative ideology.

As soon as he came to power in 2015, he undertook a legislative offensive to ensure the Executive's control over the rest of the powers, and particularly the judicial system, including a Constitutional Court whose composition he has interfered with to ensure that it is controlled by like-minded magistrates.

The EU and the European Court of Justice have intervened on various occasions to try to stop, so far with little success, a strategy that increasingly moves Poland away from European values ​​and standards of freedom and justice.