Saturday, April 13, 2024
Women Help Women
Abortion Without Borders has spent more than €11.5m (PLN 49,104,011) in time and money to provide abortion access for Polish residents, without help from the government.
Activists from Abortion Without Borders brought the ‘Polish abortion debt’ to the Sejm (Polish parliament) on Thursday (11 April), presenting an invoice to the government for the costs of time and financial assistance to provide abortion access for Polish residents.
By Vanessa Gera, The Associated Press
April 11, 2024
WARSAW, Poland (AP) — Poland’s parliament held a long-awaited debate Thursday on liberalizing the country’s strict abortion law. The traditionally Catholic nation has one of the most restrictive laws in Europe, but many women terminate pregnancies at home with pills mailed from abroad.
Lawmakers in the lower house of parliament considered four proposals and will vote Friday on whether to send them for further work.
Continued: https://apnews.com/article/poland-abortion-law-tusk-b70785a371f16d781906463dbb7ab688
Warsaw (AFP) – An unprecedented mobilisation among women brought a liberal alliance to power in Poland, raising hopes that one of Europe's strictest abortion laws would be scrapped. But now they feel betrayed.
March 8, 2024
A record 74 percent of eligible women voted in the October elections and the mobilisation of young female voters helped pro-Western parties oust the conservative Law and Justice (PiS) government.
Now however, many are voicing anger and frustration, saying the government is dragging its feet on changing the laws on women's reproductive rights.
by Michelle Goldberg
Photographs by Rafal Milach
Feb. 6, 2024
Adam Bodnar, Poland’s new justice minister, recently explained to me the immense challenge of rebuilding liberal democracy in his country after an eight-year slide toward authoritarianism. Imagine, he said, that Donald Trump had won the last election and been in power for two terms instead of one. “What would be the damage?” he asked.
After only four years of Trump, President Biden inherited a furiously divided nation, its courts seeded with right-wing apparatchiks and the nature of reality itself in deep dispute. But as even MAGA die-hards will acknowledge, Trump often failed to bend the state to his will, which is why his allies have a plan to do things differently next time, purging civil servants and replacing them with loyalists. Poland is a country that has just gone through something like what Trumpists hope to impose on us in a second term. Its institutions have been hollowed out. Many experienced technocrats and neutral judges have been replaced by lackeys and ideologues.
Continue: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/06/opinion/abortion-ban-poland-democracy.html
In the year after Dobbs, the movement has been operating in triage mode, and Abortion Camp was conceived as a conclave where activists could come together to have honest conversations about their work and what they needed from each other.
REBECCA GRANT
Oct 26, 2023
On the wall in the gym at Abortion Camp hung a massive, colorful map of the United States festooned with index cards. Each card had the name, age, pronouns, astrological sign, and affiliation of each of the 50-or-so people who had traveled from across the country, and a few from overseas, to attend the event. As a kickoff activity, the campers had broken into small groups to fill out the cards and then placed them on the map to show where they were from.
Abortion Camp was held in early September at a hotel in the Pacific Northwest. The campers ranged in age from 19 to one woman in her 80s, and spanned professions and geographies. They were doctors, midwives, abortion fund workers, community organizers, nonprofit leaders, poets, digital security specialists, lawyers, clinic escorts, doulas, and researchers. Some attendees had known each other for years, while others were meeting for the first time. What they all shared was a commitment to keeping abortion accessible in the wake of the Dobbs decision.
Continued: https://www.thenation.com/article/society/abortion-camp-activism-dobbs/
October 21, 2023
Rob Schmitz
WARSAW, Poland — As results from Poland's Sunday election began pouring in, Hubert Sobecki watched in disbelief as it started to dawn on him that the right-wing Law and Justice party would not be governing the country much longer.
"It's like living in a toxic household with a violent partner, and suddenly you're free of them," says Sobecki, a spokesman for Love Does Not Exclude, an association representing Poland's LGBTQ+ community. "How can you learn to live again?"
Continued: https://www.npr.org/2023/10/21/1207263724/poland-election-tusk-lgbtq-abortion-rights
By LORNE COOK
Mar 24, 2023
BRUSSELS (AP) — The way Justyna Wydrzyńska sees it, Ania was a victim of domestic violence just like she was. Another child and she’d be trapped. It was 2020. The pandemic lockdowns. Everyone worried that Poland’s borders might close, halting travel and postal services.
Looking to help someone she identified with, Wydrzyńska gave Ania the abortion pills she kept on hand for herself. “I just sent the pills, just shared them, because I thought it would be good for her to have this tool and decide whatever she wants (and can) leave without another kid and be able to get free from this violent relationship,” Wydrzyńska told The Associated Press in Brussels on Thursday.
Justyna Wydrzyńska is the first activist charged under Poland’s incredibly strict abortion laws. She tells VICE World News it won't stop her helping people who need abortions.
By Ruby Lott-Lavigna
June 16, 2022
WARSAW, Poland – The woman said she needed an abortion. She said she had already tried to leave Poland to get one, but her abusive husband had stopped her, threatening to go to the police. Across the world, a new virus was closing borders, restricting travel and trapping people inside their homes, and Justyna Wydrzyńska, sensing a chilling desperation, decided to send the woman a packet of abortion pills that she’d been keeping for her own personal use.
A year passed. Then out of nowhere, police arrived at Wydrzyńska’s door to search her home – some officers finding more than they anticipated.
Continued: https://www.vice.com/en/article/akezek/poland-abortion-justyna-wydrzynska
JUN 13, 2022
by Anna Gmiterek-Zabłocka, Radio TOK FM
The days of illegal – and often unsafe – abortions in backstreet clinics are long gone. Instead, a host of NGOs and activists help women obtain self-administered abortion pills, noting that the recent near-total abortion ban has increased awareness and interest in such service. That has led to a backlash from conservative groups, who are calling for the law to be toughened to prevent and more severely punish the distribution of such pills.
It is not difficult to find adverts online for gynaecologists who offer “discreet”, “safe” services “without problems”. Probably for legal reasons, the word “abortion” does not appear. We called one of the numbers.
A coalition across Europe is resisting Poland’s abortion ban. Its strategy could foreshadow activism in a post-Roe America.
Anna Louie Sussman, The New Yorker
May 17, 2022
Last month, an abortion-rights activist named Justyna Wydrzyńska stood in a courtroom in Warsaw, Poland, and described her abortion. Her lips were painted a defiant red; her voice cracked at times, but she was unapologetic. When she was thirty-three, she said, she was in an abusive marriage and learned that she was pregnant. She struggled to find accurate information online and had to order three packs of abortion pills—the first two, from the black market, were duds. She was terrified that she would bleed out or fall unconscious in front of her three children, who were too young to call an ambulance. Wydrzyńska, who is forty-seven, is now part of a coalition of activists called Abortion Without Borders. She was on trial for helping another Polish woman get an abortion.
Abortion was legal when Poland was under Communist control, but, in 1993, the predominantly Catholic country outlawed most abortions, except in cases of rape, incest, severe fetal conditions, and risk to the life of the patient. As the U.S. Supreme Court considers Roe v. Wade and giving states the ability to ban abortion, the diverse, international coalition of Abortion Without Borders may model an effective approach to abortion-rights activism in a post-Roe America—and also its risks.
Continued: https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/what-the-us-could-learn-from-abortion-without-borders
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