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PEOPLE FROM ALL OVER POLAND did not work and crowds gathered today for a seventh consecutive day of street protests in a massive outburst of anger over a higher court ruling banning abortions in cases of congenitally damaged fetuses.
Protesters in Warsaw marched from the office of the Ordo Iuris, a conservative group that has pushed for a total abortion ban, to the parliament building, which was surrounded by policemen in riot gear.
Large crowds also filled the streets of other major cities, such as Krakow, Wroclaw, Szczecin, and Lodz.
In parliament, Poland’s most powerful politician, ruling party leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski, lashed out at opposition lawmakers, accusing them of inciting people to protest during the pandemic.
“They are destroying Poland,” Kaczynski told them. “They are exposing a lot of people to death, they are criminals.”
The strike and nationwide protests came amid a deepening standoff between angry protesters and Poland’s deeply conservative government, which lobbied for last Thursday’s court ruling and vowed not to back down.
The daily protests since Poland’s constitutional court issued its decision have exposed deep divisions in a country that was long a bastion of conservative Catholicism and is now undergoing rapid social transformation.
Anger over the ruling, which would deny legal abortion to women even in cases of fatal birth defects, has been directed at the Roman Catholic Church and the leader of the ruling Kaczynski party.
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He said in the past that pregnancies involving even fetuses that are severely damaged and have no chance of surviving outside the womb should “end in a birth, so that the child can be baptized, buried, have a name.”
On Sunday, women entered Polish churches on Sunday to disrupt Masses, confronted priests with obscenities and spray-painted church buildings.
Kaczynski accused the protesters of seeking “to destroy Poland” on Tuesday night and called on his party’s supporters to defend the churches “at any cost.”
He spoke to a camera backed by Polish flags in an ad that some critics compared to a notorious 1981 martial law announcement by communist leader Wojciech Jaruzelski to crack down on anti-regime protests.
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