On Friday evening, tens of thousands of people took part in a huge demonstration in Warsaw, the capital of Poland, against the sentence of the Polish Constitutional Court which made it illegal to terminate a pregnancy in the event of a malformation of the fetus. The Court had intervened at the request of a hundred parliamentarians, and more restrictive measures on the right to abortion had been supported by the government and the Catholic Church, which is very influential in Poland.
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Friday’s demonstration was “the largest demonstration of popular anger directed against the right-wing Law and Justice party since it has been in power, that is, since 2015”, he wrote the Guardian. During the protest, signs were seen reading “We want to be able to choose, we don’t want terror”, and “Girls just want to have basic rights”. Demonstrations against the sentence, and against the government led by Law and Justice, were also held in other Polish cities, such as Poznan, Breslau, Bialystok and Lublin.
The protests have been going on for days although the government has imposed a ban on gatherings of more than five people to try to limit the coronavirus infection, which in Poland, as in most of Europe, is rapidly worsening. The Constitutional Tribunal’s ruling came in response to an appeal to the Court by about a hundred lawmakers who argued that termination of pregnancy due to fetal malformations violated the principles of the Constitution that protects every individual’s life.
The ruling amends a law on termination of pregnancy approved in 1993, which was already one of the most restrictive in Europe, and argues that allowing abortion in the event of a serious malformation of the fetus is unconstitutional. The government had already tried several times, in 2016 and last April, to introduce heavy restrictions on the right to abortion, always with the support of several Catholic religious groups and bishops close to the PiS, but in both cases he had given up after strong protests.
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The sentence has not yet officially entered into force, but when it happens in Poland, abortions will be legal only in the case of rape, incest or a serious threat to the life or health of the woman. These cases make up only 2.4 percent of the approximately 1,100 abortions performed in Polish hospitals in 2019. Although the restrictions are not yet in place, however, many hospitals have begun to cancel planned termination procedures. Second feminist organizations, even before the sentence between 100,000 and 200,000 Polish women every year were forced to resort to clandestine abortion or to go abroad in order to have access (generally in Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Germany or Ukraine).
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