Three abortion rights defenders share their stories of hope

Amnesty International
By Cécile Yougbare, SRHR activist with Médecins du Monde, Kinga Jelińska, activist from Poland and Erin Grant, Abortion Care Network Co-Executive Director 
10 March 2026

Across the world, governments and other actors are rolling back on decades of progress on gender equality, including access to abortion. But people are fighting back, determined to protect the rights so many have fought so hard to achieve.   

As the Commission on the Status of Women holds its 70th session, three courageous human rights defenders from Burkina Faso, Poland and the United States share their strategies to protect access to abortion, their hopes for the future and the reasons why they believe that, despite the many increasing challenges, humanity must always win.

Continued: https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2026/03/three-abortion-rights-defenders-share-their-stories-of-hope

The Abortion Ban That Didn’t End Abortion in Poland

Five years after Poland's top court gutted abortion rights, access to legal procedures has quietly expanded – but only for women who learned to work within a system designed to say ‘no’.

Ada Petriczko
February 4, 2026

Edyta was 29 weeks pregnant when the MRI results came back. She opened the report in a hospital corridor in Warsaw. Missing temporal bone. Disrupted neuronal migration. Abnormalities in the corpus callosum.

“I just stood there. I couldn’t move,” she tells BIRN. “The entire pregnancy everyone kept saying nothing was wrong – and then suddenly my baby's brain wasn’t developing normally.”

Continued: https://balkaninsight.com/2026/02/04/polands-precarious-post-abortion-ban-compromise-leaves-women-at-mercy-of-the-system/

Activists opened pop-up abortion clinic outside Polish parliament. Opponents threw acid at it

by Petra Dvořáková, Prague
June 20, 2025

Donald Tusk's Polish government has not yet pushed through abortion law reform. In the meantime, opposite the parliament building, feminists have opened an abortion 'clinic', where they face harassment and bullying by anti-abortion activists several times a week — with no protection from the Polish authorities.

“What can I tell you?” shrugs Nikola, a bearded Netflix employee from Bulgaria, when I ask him how he perceives the current political situation. “The whole of Europe is heading towards fascism!” “I’m constantly angry,” adds his Polish partner Anna, who is looking at sweatshirts on a rack next to the window.

Continued: https://euobserver.com/health-and-society/ar6eb25e24

Poland: Abortion rights, the big absentee in the presidential election

13/06/2025
Piotr Lapinski

Karol Nawrocki, the candidate backed by the conservative Law and Justice (PiS) party, was elected President of Poland on Sunday 1 June 2025. While this country is one of the most restrictive European states with abortion legislation, this election raises concerns about the future of abortion rights.

13 June 2025. Every year, thousands of women leave Poland to terminate their pregnancies. Those who can’t, do so in unsafe conditions, risking their lives. This well-documented reality was formally recognized in an investigative report published in 2024 by the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW). The report concluded that the criminalization of abortion assistance, combined with rare legal exceptions and frequent inaccessibility of services, prevents the majority of Polish women from exercising the right to safe and legal abortion.

Continued: https://www.fidh.org/en/region/europe-central-asia/poland/poland-abortion-rights-the-big-absentee-in-the-presidential-election

Nearly half of Polish women voted for Karol Nawrocki, dashing hopes for abortion reform

Activists are disillusioned by the new president’s plan to stop liberalisation.

Aleksandra Krzysztoszek, Euractiv Poland
Jun 10, 2025

The election of conservative firebrand Karol Nawrocki as Poland's president is slamming the brakes on plans to legislate for legal abortion, leaving reproductive rights activists disillusioned and looking abroad once more.

Throughout the election campaign, Nawrocki left little doubt about his stance on abortion, pledging not to sign a proposed law by Donald Tusk's centrist coalition that would restore the so-called abortion compromise which would legalise abortion in cases of rape, severe fetal abnormalities, or threat to the mother’s life.

Continued: https://www.euractiv.com/section/politics/news/nearly-half-of-polish-women-voted-for-karol-nawrocki-dashing-hopes-for-abortion-reform/

Nawrocki win is ‘devastating blow’ for abortion rights activists in Poland

Any hopes to liberalize the country’s strict abortion rules are lost as the nationalist candidate secured a narrow win.

June 3, 2025
By Claudia Chiappa

Lawmakers and activists are warning that nationalist candidate Karol Nawrocki’s win in the Polish presidential election represents a “defeat” for women’s rights and further threatens abortion access in Poland.

Nawrocki, a self-described football hooligan backed by the right-wing nationalist Law and Justice (PiS) party — and by U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration — won Poland’s presidential election last weekend, narrowly beating centrist Rafał Trzaskowski.

Continued: https://www.politico.eu/article/nawrocki-win-is-devastating-blow-for-abortion-rights-activists-in-poland/

Polish election: Tusk party urged to show it is not ‘deceiving women’ on abortion

Five years after near-total ban on abortion, campaigners say Sunday’s elections will be critical to see if promised change happens

Ashifa Kassam, European community affairs correspondent
Thu 15 May 2025

Poland’s presidential elections are a “historic, groundbreaking” chance for Donald Tusk’s centrist party to show it was not trying to “deceive women” when it promised to change some of Europe’s most restrictive abortion laws, campaigners have said.

Voters across Poland will head to the polls on Sunday in the first round of the elections to replace Andrzej Duda, the current president who is aligned with the former rightwing government and has veto power over legislation.

Polls have suggested the frontrunner is Rafał Trzaskowski, the mayor of Warsaw, whose centrist Civic Coalition led by the prime minister, Donald Tusk, has promised to relax abortion laws. But in recent weeks his lead has narrowed and support has climbed for Karol Nawrocki of the populist, anti-abortion Law and Justice (PiS) party, suggesting the two could be pitted against each other in a runoff vote on 1 June.

Continued: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/may/15/poland-elections-tusk-centrists-abortion-laws-campaign-europe

‘Sculpting within the law’: Where does Poland stand on abortion?

Ada Petriczko
May 12, 2025

WARSAW - Two years after Donald Tusk became Poland's prime minister and promised to reform strict abortion rules, many of the women who supported him are disillusioned and say a May 18 presidential vote is unlikely to bring the change they were promised.

This is despite the fact that a liberal candidate could replace conservative President Andrzej Duda, who has long opposed easing some of Europe's strictest abortion laws.

"I'm still shocked that they reached for our votes when they needed them, and then completely discarded us," said activist Anna Pięta, who helped create a viral campaign that urged women to vote in 2023.

Continued: https://www.context.news/money-power-people/polish-presidential-vote-unlikely-to-resolve-abortion-impasse

French progressives bring abortion pills to Poland

Agence France-Presse
April 30, 2025

French hard-left politicians visited Poland on Tuesday to bring abortion and morning-after pills, in a show of support for activists, to the Catholic country whose termination laws are among Europe’s most stringent.

Representatives from the France Unbowed (LFI) party delivered around 300 pills to activists in Warsaw, and vowed to send more in the future.

Continued: https://globalnation.inquirer.net/275209/french-hard-left-bring-abortion-pills-to-poland

30.04.2025

Inside a Czech Abortion Network Offering Pregnant Women from Poland a Lifeline

Apr 29, 2025
By Tamara Davison

Eva Ptasková was waiting in a dimly lit parking lot near the Czech-Polish border at 4 a.m. for someone she’d never met.

“It was empty and dark,” Ptasková recalled about the unusual mid-pandemic encounter, adding that she kept her colleague on the phone for safety.

Eventually, a figure exited a taxi and clambered into Ptasková’s car — a woman from Poland, who had traveled to the neighboring Czech Republic for an abortion. With just hours to spare before the appointment, Ptašková listened to the woman recount her life story as they drove through the night. It was the first time the Polish woman, who was already a mother to a young baby, had left her homeland.

Continued: https://www.moretoherstory.com/stories/inside-a-czech-abortion-network-offering-pregnant-women-from-poland-a-lifeline