Poles protest plan to ban abortion of unviable fetuses

WARSAW, Poland — Polish women gathered on Monday in cities across the country to protest a proposal to ban abortions in cases where fetuses are badly damaged or have no chance of survival after birth.

Many wore black, a symbol of mourning for the feared loss of reproductive rights, as they took to the streets of Warsaw, Gdansk, Lodz, Wroclaw, Poznan and other cities and towns across the predominantly Roman Catholic nation of 38 million.

“Girls just want to have fundamental rights,” one banner proclaimed.

The Monday protests follow a similar round of street demonstrations in early October, reaction to a proposal for an even more restrictive law that would have banned abortion in all cases, including rape, and imposed prison sentences of up to five years on women and doctors involved in terminating pregnancies. Massive so-called “Black Protests” forced lawmakers to abandon that proposal.

The women, joined by many men, have returned to the streets in response to a new proposal by Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the head of the ruling Law and Justice party. This month, he said his party wants to ensure that even pregnancies involving a child “certain to die, very deformed, still end up in a birth, so that the child can be baptized, buried, have a name.”

In the weeks since the first round of protests, the grassroots movement advocating abortion rights has increased its demands. Those who turned out Monday also called for better sex education and easier access to birth control while also demanding that the influential Roman Catholic church end its “interference” in political life and public education. Clashes broke out between abortion rights supporters and anti-abortion activists outside a metro station in central Warsaw where demands were laid out in a petition that a steady stream of people lined up to sign.

“We want to live in a secular society,” said Agata Rybka, a 24-year-old student of bio-technology at Warsaw University who had volunteered to oversee the petition signing. “Right now religious issues dominate public discourse and we don’t like it.”

On the other side, counter protesters turned out in smaller numbers, supporting the government’s position. Poland already has one of the most restrictive abortion laws in Europe.