Warsaw was braced for a second night of violent protests on Friday night after a court ruling that effectively abolished the country’s abortion regime.
On Thursday the country’s highest court ruled unconstitutional a provision allowing women to terminate a pregnancy in the case of a foetus with congenital defects.
In the ruling, constitutional tribunal president Julia Przylebska said abortions in cases of foetal abnormality legalised “eugenic practices with regard to an unborn child, thus denying it the respect and protection of human dignity”.
As Poland’s constitution guarantees a right to life, she said, terminating a pregnancy based on the health of the foetus amounted to a “forbidden form of discrimination”.
Hours after the verdict, which cannot be appealed, hundreds of people took to the streets in Warsaw and other Polish cities protesting against a drastic tightening of abortion laws that were already among Europe’s strictest. Now abortions in the central European country are legal only in cases of rape, incest or threat to the mother’s health.
Some of the protests turned violent in Warsaw on Thursday night, with police using pepper spray and detaining at least 15 demonstrators.
“Women in Poland are completely shocked and so angry, but we hope to focus their anger with a new campaign to push for a liberalised abortion regime,” said Wanda Nowicka, an opposition leader and head of the Federation for Women and Family.
Prison fears
Official figures show that about 98 per cent of the 1,110 legal abortions performed in Poland last year were due to foetal conditions such as Down syndrome, or to physical defects.
Ms Nowicka’s pro-choice group estimates that about 150,000 abortions are performed each year, with the number performed abroad standing at 15 per cent and rising. The group fears Thursday’s ruling could result in prison sentences for women who decide to have an abortion illegally.
President Andrzej Duda welcomed the court’s decision, via a spokesman, saying he was “satisfied the tribunal stood on the side of life”.
Leading anti-abortion activist Kaja Godek, an MP and mother of a child with Down syndrome, greeted the ruling as a Polish pushback against “a strong European abortion lobby that lean on EU member states to liberalise terminations”.
Since taking office in 2015, and securing re-election last year, Poland’s ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party had promised to tighten the abortion criteria as part of its national conservative political agenda.
The ruling is likely to boost PiS’s rural conservative base as well as its long-time strategic alliance with the Catholic Church. Polish bishops have been pushing to close down such abortions since the transition to democracy in 1990 saw an end to the liberal communist-era abortion regime.
Thursday’s ruling was issued by a constitutional court controlled by judges allied to the PiS government. Court president Julia Przylebska is a close confidant of PiS leader and deputy prime minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski, and the two meet regularly.
