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DEMONSTRATIONS: The main street of the Polish capital was blocked by protesters on Monday. Photo: AGENCJA GAZETA / REUTERS
Several thousand Poles blocked the streets of Warsaw during the fifth day of demonstrations in the country.
Young men and women equipped with porcelain drums and putters blocked Warsaw’s main roads for several hours during rush hour Monday.
They defy the pandemic to mark their aversion to a new law change that in practice eliminates almost all abortion opportunities in the Catholic country.
This Monday marks five days since the constitutional court of the country ruled that abortion is prohibited even though it has been found that the fetus is seriously injured.
This legal provision is today the basis of almost all abortions in the country. In practice, this means that abortion is completely prohibited in the Catholic country, known for having one of the strictest abortion laws in Europe.
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Motorists, cyclists and pedestrians blocked roundabouts for several hours in the Polish capital. Some of them took off their clothes and went topless on the roofs of the cars.
The protesters carried banners and posters with inscriptions such as “Enough!”, “I don’t want to be your martyr” and “I want elections, not terror”.
In one of the main streets of Warsaw, Reuters meets Piotr Wybanski, 31 years old. He tells the news agency that he will stay there until it is over.
– I don’t care if it means a week, a month, three months or three years. “I want to demonstrate here day after day,” Wybanski told Reuters.
BLOCKED: Thousands of protesters stopped traffic in the Polish capital in the middle of rush hour on Monday. Photo: RADEK PIETRUSZKA / PAP
According to AP, on Monday there were demonstrations in 150 cities in Poland, including Poznan, Lodz and Katowice.
The Constitutional Court decision came after several right-wing elected representatives called for further toughening of abortion legislation.
In Krakow, protesters shouted “this is war,” which the news agency says is a slogan that has been widely used in recent days.
On Sunday, protesters took over several churches in the country.
“We have had enough,” protesters shouted inside a church in Poznan, an incident that was shown on social media and repeated in churches across the deeply Catholic country.
NO: A woman stands in front of a church in Warsaw to protest against the restriction of abortion legislation in Poland. Photo: Czarek Sokolowski / AP
The scenes of angry women protesting the church are a dramatic change in Poland, where the Catholic Church has been almost synonymous with the Polish nation for centuries and was especially respected for supporting the struggle for democracy in the communist era, NTB writes.
However, the church’s authority has been weakened by the clear support of the right-wing PiS government and by various scandals involving priests accused of abuse, according to the news agency.
The Ogolnopolski Strike Kobiet (Polish women’s strike) organization is behind several of the demonstrations in recent days.
Leader Marta Lempart told the AP that there will be a nationwide strike on Wednesday and a protest march against various buildings in Warsaw on Friday.
