Polish women storm churches to protest new ruling on abortion
WARSAW, POLAND — Women’s rights activists furious over a tightening of Poland’s already restrictive abortion law staged protests outside and inside churches on Sunday, disrupting masses and finding themselves confronted with accusations of “barbaric” behaviour.
At the Holy Cross Church in Warsaw, a group of far-right nationalists blocked stairs leading to the entrance. When one woman managed to push her way through, the nationalists grabbed and threw her on the pavement.
A video posted from the northern Polish city of Szczecinek showed young women surrounding a priest and yelling at him to “Go back to the church” and to “F--- off.”
The actions on Sunday follow a ruling on Thursday by Poland’s constitutional court that declared that aborting fetuses with congenital defects is unconstitutional.
Poland already had one of Europe’s most restrictive abortion laws, and the ruling will result in a near-complete ban on abortion.
With the coronavirus surging in Poland, large groups of people packed closely together demonstrated their rage on the streets for a fourth straight night in cities large and small across the country, including Warsaw, Gdansk and Poznan, where mounted police on horse guarded a church.
In the southern city of Katowice, tensions were high as a large presence of riot police separated protesters and members of the All-polish Youth, a far-right ultranationalist organization.
TVN24, a private news station, broadcast images of farmers on tractors driving through the town of Nowy Dwor Gdanski in support of the women protesters. A sign on one tractor said, “We want choice, not PIS terror.” PIS is the Polish acronym for the country’s conservative governing party, Law and Justice.
Scenes of angry young women entering churches and confronting priests with obscenities signals a dramatic historical change in Poland, where the Roman Catholic Church has been venerated for centuries as the highest authority and where such events would have been unthinkable not so long ago.
The Catholic Church earned respect during the communist era for supporting pro-democracy dissidents in their struggle for freedom, and the late Polish pope St. John Paul II is held up as a national hero. But today, Poland’s Catholic Church is often viewed by liberal Poles as a reactionary force standing on the side of the country’s rightwing government.