‘Declaration of War’: Protesters fight abortion ban
It’s an attempt to take away the rights of half of the citizens by referring to religion, when it’s all about power.
Nadia Klos, a member of the Queen Tour, an LGBT group.
Women’s rights advocates and allies in Poland vowed yesterday to continue to fight a near-total ban on abortion, calling it a breach of human rights and a sign that the country is regressing.
The constitutional court ruling, which abruptly came into effect on Thursday, tightened Poland’s already restrictive laws to further ban abortions in cases of fetal abnormalities. It spurred thousands of outraged Poles to take to the streets to express their defiance, despite limits on public gatherings because of the coronavirus pandemic.
“This decision is a declaration of war,” Marta Lempart, a protest organiser, said yesterday.
When the ruling was first announced in October, it set off a month of protests on a scale not seen since the 1989 collapse of communism. It was unclear precisely why the government, after delaying implementation of the ruling for months in the face of the protests, moved suddenly to bring it into legal force on Thursday.
The move came as Poland was struggling through the economic repercussions of the pandemic, a partial lockdown and a sluggish vaccine rollout.
The action could pose political risks for the governing Law and Justice Party judging by polls that have shown an overwhelming majority oppose the ban.
More protests are planned this week, and yesterday hundreds of people turned out in Warsaw under a heavy police presence. Among the protesters was Nadia Klos, a member of the Queen Tour, an LGBT group.
“The way they are forcing through changes in the midst of the pandemic is unbelievable,” Klos said.
“It’s an attempt to take away the rights of half of the citizens by referring to religion, when it’s all about power.”
The demonstration grew tense yesterday, when police officers told protesters they had to show identification before they could leave the area, video from the scene showed. Local news outlets reported several arrests.
The Constitutional Tribunal, the country’s top court, which issued the ruling, explained the decision by saying that “human life has value in every phase of its evolution, and as a value, the source of which is in the constitutional laws, it should be protected by lawmakers”.
Far-right lawmakers and supporters of the ban welcomed legal enforcement of the ruling.
Abortion from fetal abnormalities should be prohibited, said Beata Kempa, a Polish member of the European Parliament, adding that she had been upset by discussions in the European Parliament on the issue. “Nobody at all mentioned the right of a child to live.”
Even before the tribunal’s decision, Poland’s abortion laws were among the most restrictive in Europe, allowing for termination of pregnancies only in cases of rape or incest, a threat to a woman’s life and fetal abnormalities. In practice, most legal abortions — 1074 of 1100 performed in 2019 — resulted from fetal abnormalities.
The right-wing Law and Justice party tried to implement a total abortion ban in 2016 and 2018, but backed off after mass demonstrations. This time, the government introduced the ban by using the tribunal, which it effectively took over in 2016 as part of a judiciary overhaul that has been criticised at home and abroad.
The decision by the tribunal cannot be appealed.
“The only possible action is on the international level, through the European Court of Human Rights and the UN committees,” said Adam Bodnar, the country’s human-rights officer. “On the national level, the only way this decision could be reversed is by changing the government.”
The next elections are scheduled in 2023.
The ruling has a very personal dimension for millions of Polish women.
“Women are really scared to get pregnant right now,” said Dominika Sitnicka, a journalist at OKO.press, a news outlet that conducts research and analysis.
“Yesterday was not just a symbol of something. It was doomsday.”
As a result of the ban, Polish women will be forced to “travel abroad or have clandestine abortions — for those who can afford it,” said Dunja Mijatovic, human-rights commissioner for Council of Europe.