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Monday in Poland was the fifth consecutive day of protests against a ruling by the country’s Constitutional Court declaring it illegal to interrupt a pregnancy in the event of a malformation of the fetus. After the sentence last Thursday, thousands of people took to the streets of many cities in Poland to demonstrate: the targets of the protests are the country’s government, led by the right-wing and populist Law and Justice (PiS) party, the Court Constitutional and the Catholic Church, whose influence on Polish political life is very strong and has been instrumental in restricting important rights such as the right to terminate pregnancy.
The demonstrations were organized by feminist movements and were very well attended: some very busy roads in more than 50 cities in the country were blocked, there were clashes with the police and in some cases with far-right groups that organized counter-demonstrations. Organizers said there were more than 150 cities involved, and these days it is one of the biggest protests in recent years. Among the posters displayed on Monday, he wrote the BBC, one of the most popular said: “I would like to abort my government.” In Warsaw, a protesting woman was hospitalized with minor injuries after being hit by a car, although it is unclear whether it was an accident or not.
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However, over the weekend, in addition to the streets, protesters also invaded Catholic churches, disrupting the celebrations. They entered the cathedral in Poznan, in western Poland, shouting: “Even Catholics need an abortion!” The mass was interrupted and some 30 people were reported to the police. In Warsaw they entered a downtown church with the slogan: “We pray for the right to abortion.” On Sunday, in front of the Church of the Holy Cross, there were clashes with far-right groups. Robert Bąkiewicz, one of the leaders of the Polish far right, announced over the weekend that nationalist groups would form a “national guard” to defend the churches from the demonstrations. There were also large protests in front of the presidential palace in Warsaw.
Thousands of activists disrupted religious services in Poland on Sunday, chanting during mass and spraying slogans on walls to protest a court ruling that amounts to a near-total ban on abortion https://t.co/GWVHJiixCS pic.twitter.com/p1mLEqvjUP
– Reuters (@Reuters) October 26, 2020
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 much of Europe, is rapidly worsening, so much so that even the The country’s president, Andrzej Duda, tested positive for coronavirus.
The ruling of the Polish Constitutional Court came in response to an appeal to the court by a hundred parliamentarians who argued that the termination of pregnancy due to fetal malformations violated the principles of the Constitution that protects the life of all people. The ruling modifies a law for the termination of pregnancy passed in 1993, which was already one of the most restrictive in Europe, and maintains that allowing abortion in the event of a serious malformation of the fetus is unconstitutional. The government had already tried on several occasions, in 2016 and last April, to introduce strong restrictions on the right to abortion, always with the support of several Catholic religious groups and bishops close to PiS, but in both cases it had given up after strong protests.
The ruling has not yet officially entered into force, but when it happens in Poland, abortions will be legal only in case of rape, incest or a serious threat to the life or health of the woman. These cases represent only 2.4 percent of the roughly 1,100 abortions performed in Polish hospitals in 2019. guardian He wrote that although the restrictions are not yet in effect, many hospitals have begun canceling already scheduled abortion procedures. According to feminist organizations, even before the ruling, between 100,000 and 200,000 Polish women each year were forced to resort to clandestine abortions or to go abroad to gain access (usually in Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Germany or Ukraine).
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