NOSVomen’s doctor Maria Kubisa in her practice in the Polish port city of Szczecin
NOS Nieuws•vandaag, 23:25
Charlotte Waaijers
Germany correspondent
Charlotte Waaijers
Germany correspondent
It is the fight to preserve their country, most Poles seem to agree. Only: which Poland should that be? That question is splitting the country in Sunday’s elections: it appears to be a neck-and-neck race between the ruling party PiS and the opposition party Civic Platform.
The current government wants to continue its right-wing conservative policy. She is increasingly turning away from the European Union and has a lot of support in the countryside and in the east.
But the more progressive opposition, more popular in the cities and in the west, fears the end of democracy in Poland if the government is allowed to continue like this. For example, they point to the increasingly strict rules on abortion, which they see as a specter for the future.
Fear of pregnancy
There have always been women who wanted to be sterilized so that they could not become pregnant, says gynecologist Maria Kubisa in her practice in the Polish port city of Szczecin. But lately there have clearly been more. “Sometimes more than ten a week.”
“Women are afraid of getting pregnant in Poland,” she says. Abortion is virtually prohibited, unless there is incest, rape or danger to the mother. Even if a fetus is likely to be stillborn, women are no longer allowed to receive help if they want to terminate the pregnancy for three years.
Major protests erupted in Poland after several women reportedly died in hospitals because doctors no longer wanted to terminate dangerous pregnancies. This has not yet been determined, the lawsuits are still ongoing.
‘They took everything’
Kubisa only helps women in her other clinic, just across the border in Germany, where this is legal. Also for Polish women.
Armed men burst into her Polish practice at the beginning of this year, she says, pointing to the cupboards and drawers. “They started searching everything. My phone, laptops and they took about 6,000 paper patient files. With not only address details and telephone numbers, but also how often a patient has had children and whether she has had miscarriages.”
The men turned out to be from the Polish anti-corruption unit. According to Kubisa, they did not say why they searched her practice. She now knows that she was suspected of illegally assisting with abortion. Patients were called after the raid to testify against her. But she was never presented with an official complaint, she says. “It’s complete nonsense.”
She sees the searches as a witch hunt, caused by the right-wing conservative ruling party PiS. As far as she is concerned, the elections next Sunday are the last chance to stop this kind of intimidation and protect women’s rights.
‘Protection of life’
“We are quite satisfied with the current legislation,” says Sébastien Meuwissen at the Ordo Iuris office in Warsaw. It is partly thanks to the lawyers of this influential conservative lobby group that the government led by the PiS party was able to initiate the change.
“While others may talk about tightening abortion laws, we prefer to talk about expanding the protection of life,” says Meuwissen. “We’ve been working on that for years.”
Ordo Iuris also specializes in cases such as the one against Doctor Kubisa, an issue that received a lot of media attention. Communications director Meuwissen is not aware of the case, he says, and therefore only wants to say in general: “I very much doubt that these types of operations are carried out to intimidate women. I am convinced that the aim is to enforce the law.”
After media reports last year about women who had fled from Ukraine to Poland and wanted to have an abortion there because they reported that they had been raped during the war, asked Ordo Iuris obtains information about this from 370 hospitals. Although abortion after rape is legal in Poland, the organization wanted to know whether hospitals had sufficiently checked whether the women had actually been raped to prevent “abortion on demand”. Not the women, but the doctors are then punishable.
As far as Meuwissen is concerned, Poland has a lot to lose in the elections on Sunday if the government has to leave. “Although Poland is seen as a traditional, conservative and Catholic country, that can change very quickly.”
Unequal rights
If right-wing conservatives remain in power, Doctor Kubisa will probably leave Poland. “Then I can’t work here anymore. I’m just worried about my patients, because who will take care of them?”
By the way, her Polish patients can now only go to her clinic in Germany for sterilization. Doctors in Poland are not allowed to sterilize women, unlike men.
But Kubisa does not have those appointments in Germany in the agenda in Szczecin. “I’m scared. What if someone comes again and takes information?”
2023-10-13 21:25:30
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