Abortion in Poland: serious step backwards

Demonstration against the tightening of the abortion law yesterday in Poznan (Poland) .Jakub Kaczmarczyk / EFE

While the advancement of freedoms found a new and important ally in Argentina, where the Senate approved in December the decriminalization of abortion after a massive and long-sustained mobilization by numerous women, the cause is backing away in forced marches in an important European country : Poland.

The Constitutional Court of this country decided in October to make abortion illegal in the event of serious malformations of the fetus, such as illness or disability, an assumption that covered 97% of the scarce 1,110 legal abortions in the country.

After the declaration of unconstitutionality, only incest, rape and danger to the life of the mother remain as the only legal reasons.

The wave of indignation generated by the Constitutional decision led the government of the ultra-conservative Law and Justice (PiS) to delay the official publication of the same, which finally took place this Wednesday.

Despite the pandemic and bans on gathering more than five people, protests have since spread to Warsaw and other cities in the country.

Thousands of activists have defied the ban to speak out against a decline in their rights unique in Europe.

Some have been arrested.

The now reformed law was already one of the most restrictive in Europe and it is estimated that between 80,000 and 120,000 women travel abroad to abort.

Others buy abortion pills illegally or do it clandestinely, with the risk involved.

On the European continent, only San Marino, Andorra and Malta are even more restrictive, since they do not allow abortion under any circumstances.

Poland thus distinguishes itself in the EU as the only member country in which this right not only does not advance, but also recedes.

The also Catholic Ireland, where the voluntary termination of pregnancy was anathema for decades, legalized it in 2018 after a referendum in which the population was inclined to repeal the eighth amendment to the Constitution, which equated the mother's right to life with that of the fetus.

66.4% voted in favor.

Two factors have come together in Poland, a member of the European Union since 2004, to make possible this first setback in women's reproductive rights in the history of the EU: deeply Catholic tradition and roots, on the one hand, and illiberal practices of a conservative government that challenges the regime of rights and freedoms that it embraced after the fall of communism with increasing control of the judicial apparatus.

The appointment of judges of the Constitutional Court has put the independence of this court in question.

And the authoritarian drift continues.