By Reuters
March 12, 2026
WARSAW, March 12 (Reuters) - The number of legal abortions in Poland doubled in 2024, while complaints to Polish authorities over conscience clause refusals in the country have ceased, the Council of Europe said on Thursday.
Poland, a predominantly Catholic country, introduced a near-total abortion ban in 2021 under the previous nationalist government after pregnancy termination due to foetal abnormalities was ruled unconstitutional.
Germany recently passed incremental liberalisations to its abortion law. Yet access to abortion remains under threat, and far-right and conservative forces blocked its partial legalisation. Lisa Brünig explains how these processes are symptomatic of broader democratic backsliding
Lisa Brünig
March 10, 2026
In 2022, America's top court overturned the 1973 ruling guaranteeing women the right to abortion. In Poland, despite the efforts of Donald Tusk's Civic Coalition, abortion is permitted only in exceptional circumstances.
Germany's government, by contrast, recently took steps to liberalise the country's abortion laws. In 2022, it abolished paragraph 219a, which prohibited doctors and clinics stating on their websites that they provided abortions. In 2024, Germany also criminalised harassment outside clinics and counselling centres. Despite these incremental legal changes, however, abortion remains criminalised under Germany's Penal Code, and structural barriers to abortion care persist..
Continued: https://theloop.ecpr.eu/abortion-law-reform-in-germany-amid-democratic-backsliding/
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.”
During decades of communist rule, Poland had one of the most liberal abortion laws in Europe. But in 1993, four years after the fall of communism, abortion was largely banned because the Catholic Church strongly advocated a complete ban on termination of pregnancy.
25.12.2025
Their baby's heartbeat gave Dorota Lalik and her husband Marcin hope that everything could be fine after all. Dorota, a 33-year-old pharmacist, was rushed to the hospital one Sunday morning when her water broke at 20 weeks pregnant.
in such circumstances, pregnancies are very risky and often unsustainable. Without amniotic fluid, the fetus is at high risk of infections, which can cause sepsis, which can be fatal for the pregnant woman.
But Marcin says that he and Dorota, who was given antibiotics by doctors and advised to rest and keep her legs elevated, were repeatedly assured by hospital staff "that everything looked good and that no one was in danger."
While the European Parliament’s decision to back a voluntary abortion access fund will not change Maltese law, the voting patterns highlight how Malta’s political parties remain out of step with mainstream European positions on reproductive rights.
22 December 2025
by James Debono
The European Parliament’s vote to support the creation of an EU fund facilitating access to abortion care was widely described as historic.
The plan would establish a voluntary, opt-in financial mechanism to help member states provide abortion care to women who can’t access it in their own country and who choose to travel to one with more liberal laws.
Nov 13, 2025
Notes on Poland
The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) has ruled that Poland violated the rights of a pregnant woman who had to travel abroad to obtain an abortion after her foetus was diagnosed with a birth defect. It is the second time that the court has issued a judgment against Poland relating to its near-total abortion ban.
The ECHR found that the woman’s right to private and family life was violated by the legal uncertainty created by the delay between the Polish Constitutional Tribunal (TK) ruling of October 2020, which banned abortion in cases of birth defects, and its implementation by the government over three months later.
22.10.2025
October 22 marks five years since the autumn of 2020, when hundreds of thousands of people poured onto the streets of more than 600 cities and towns across Poland in the largest demonstrations since the Solidarity movement helped bring down communism in 1989.
Across Poland red flares lit up the night as crowds carrying the lightning-bolt symbol of the Women’s Strike filled the streets. Chants against the Catholic Church and the then-ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party echoed across the country - defining images of outrage over a near-total abortion ban.
Jul 17, 2025
Notes from Poland
Three doctors have been handed prison sentences for their negligence in treating a pregnant woman who died in hospital under their care. Her death in 2021 prompted mass protests against Poland’s near-total abortion ban, which had been introduced earlier that year.
The 30-year-old woman, Izabela, was admitted to hospital in the 22th week of her pregnancy following a premature rupture of membranes. Her foetus, which had severe developmental defects, subsequently died, and then so did Izabela herself soon after due to septic shock.
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
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.
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