March 29, 2018

Women in Poland take to the streets to march for their lives

located:	Poland
editor:	Shira Jeczmien

Last week, under a grey March sky, thousands of Polish women took to the streets once more to protest against an anti-abortion bill. Lawmakers from the Law and Justice Party (PiS), a national-conservative party currently the largest in Polish government, are making a renewed attempt to pass a previously rejected bill that will see the all abortions become illegal, even if the fetus is guaranteed to die in infancy.

When the bill was first introduced in October 2016, it included limited access to prenatal care and contraception while also pursuing legal threat to women who sought abortion care outside of the country, and to doctors who aided them. As a response, more than 150,000 women rallied in the streets of 140 cities. Two days later, the bill was rejected.

Jaroslaw Kaczynski, co-founder and current chairman of the Law and Justice Party, has publically spoken out on his political and religious goals. In 2016 he stated that he “strives to make cases of even very difficult pregnancies, when the child is doomed to die because it is severely deformed, finish with birth, so that the child can be baptized, buried, given a name.” In a country that is currently experiencing the slow rooting of right-wing ideology and autocratic ruling, the women of Poland are not only fighting for reproductive rights, they are fighting for their lives. In recent years the country has severely distanced itself from European allies by supporting the independence turn of the high courts, and suggesting to pass a bill that some 200 nongovernmental organisations the world over and the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights have condemned “places women’s health and lives at risk and violate Poland’s international human rights obligations.”

Previously a country that was considered extremely liberal for its abortion rights, which were made legal by the Communist rule in 1956, the fall of the party and the rise of the Catholic church saw the outlawing of abortion in 1993. Yet since 2015, the Law and Justice Party has been fighting hard to limit women’s rights to reproductive choices even further. Under the legal ‘conscience clause’, doctors have the right to refuse giving out contraceptive prescriptions and pharmacists can refuse to dispense them.

The march that saw thousands of women spill out to the streets once again is only a reminder to the power for change women have in each and every society. The bill currently needs to be reviewed by another commission before it will be passed to Members of Parliament for a vote – where the Law and Justice party reign with 66 seats out of 100 in the senate. President Andrzej Duda, who is close to the Catholic Church, vowed to sign the controversial bill into law if approved by parliament. ‘STOP’ the picket signs read in black and red. This is a call for women and men all over the world to join the fight, and stop the repression of women’s rights for good. Sign this Amnestry International petition to put pressure on the Polish parliament and President to reject this bill.

Photo: Krytyka Polityczna & European Alternatives