On 22 October 2020, images of the Polish women’s strike spread worldwide after the top Polish court ruled against abortions. Poland had just confirmed its status as one of Europe's most restrictive nations on the issue of abortion.
The Constitutional Court ruled on the unconstitutionality of a law allowing abortion due to foetal defects. The ruling triggered the hundreds of thousands of Poles captured in those images. Enraged, the citizens launched the country’s largest demonstration ever. People called for the revocation of the ruling, which appears to be a near-total abortion ban that will further limit women’s rights in the country. Despite the massive protest, the much-disputed law went into force on 27 January 2021 after the court published the law in the government’s official journal.
The new law recognises abortion as legal only in cases of rape, incest, or if the mother's health is at risk, removing de jure the possibility to abort in cases where prenatal tests reveal foetus DNA abnormalities. In 2019, out of the 1,110 legal abortions in Poland, 1,074 women chose abortion after a prenatal test. Considering the new law and the number of abortions registered in 2019, the situation in Poland illustrates the government’s refusal to acknowledge the needs of Polish women and to respect women’s rights.
ABORTION IN THE INTERNATIONAL HUMAN RIGHTS INSTRUMENTS
According to the United Nations, denying access to health services that only women require, including abortion, is linked to discrimination and can constitute gender-based violence, torture, and/or cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment. Thus, access to safe abortion is a human right. In addition, the Special Rapporteur on the Right to Health has stated that laws criminalising abortion “infringe women’s dignity and autonomy by severely restricting decision making by women in respect of their sexual and reproductive health”.
Abortion restrictions affect a woman’s life in several ways. The Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) has noted that “when faced with restricted access, women often engage in clandestine abortions including self-administering abortifacients, at risk to their life and health. Additionally, criminalisation has a stigmatising impact on women, and deprives women of their privacy, self-determination and autonomy of decision, offending women’s equal status, constituting discrimination.”
Preventing women from accessing an abortion or shrinking the right to do so does not reduce the number of women who need them. In fact, women facing such restrictions are more likely to seek unsafe practices that may put their lives at risk. As reported by the World Health Organization (WHO), complications due to unsafe abortion procedures account for an estimated 13% of maternal deaths worldwide, or 47,000, per year.
THE RIGHT TO ABORTION IN POLAND: AN ISOLATED CASE OR A DERIVATION OF THE NATIONAL HERITAGE
As one of the most religious European countries, it is important to consider the cultural context where the new law is going to be applied. Abortion is very often seen as a threat to life by Catholic religious people who consider the interruption of pregnancy as an unacceptable practice. The right-wing ruling party, Law and Justice (PiS), is not new in its conservative attitude, which is leading the country away from a chance to be a truly European democracy. The European Parliament has gone so far as to say that the near-total-ban on abortion is “yet another example of the political takeover of the judiciary and the systemic collapse of the rule of law” in Poland. Indeed, the country is already a recipient of an infringement procedure launched by the European Commission and recently came under the international spotlight for the institution of LGBT-free zones. Far from those values to which the European Union was founded, the Republic of Poland has confirmed itself as a truly conservative country.
Giuseppe Scuccimarra holds a BA in International Relations and European Studies and a Master’s in Human Rights and Multi-Level Governance from the University of Padua, Italy. He is interested in human rights, rule of law and democracy, and specifically how these manifest in sport and business.