What Poland Tells America About Abortion Politics

Democrats and Republicans alike can learn from the only other country to roll back the legal right to abortion in the last 15 years.

by ELLA CREAMER
11/07/2022

It happened like this: A dogged religious right and a determined set of anti-abortion movers and shakers poured years of work into curbing abortion access. Their efforts swayed conservative politicians, who adopted opposition to abortion as a central ideological goal in a vicious culture war. They appointed conservative judges to the courts, and when the topic of abortion crossed those judges’ dockets, they made a shocking yet predictable ruling that vastly curtailed abortion access.

No, I’m not talking about the U.S. This is what happened in Poland.

Continued: https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/11/07/poland-america-abortion-politics-00065416

USA – At 18 weeks pregnant, she faced an immense decision with just days to make it

October 27, 2022
Selena Simmons-Duffin
11-Minute Listen, with transcript

In April, Karla Renée got a surprise positive on a pregnancy test. She and her husband Sam had tried unsuccessfully to get pregnant before and had expected they'd need fertility treatments.

"For it to just happen naturally felt like a miracle," she says. "We were ecstatic."

Continued: https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2022/10/27/1131410832/abortion-law-exception-fetal-anomaly

27.10.2022

chorionic villus sampling

women's abortion stories

United States

Health

Human Rights

Her mother’s abortion was required under China’s one-child policy. Her own would be illegal under Tennessee’s post-Roe ban

by Eric Boodman
Sept. 29, 2022

It started as a joke. Jen was early in her first pregnancy, sitting with her husband after lunch. You know those gimmicky websites, he was saying, where you can name a star after someone and the person gets a certificate in the mail? What if, instead, we named our child after the biggest planet in the solar system?

He was kidding, but Jen kind of liked it. Jupiter. She liked the sound of it — and how awesome, to share a name with something so huge, encircled by so many moons. She hadn’t imagined herself as a mom. When they were looking at houses, she’d insisted on a yard for their dog; she hadn’t been thinking about room for kids. But then something in her shifted, and here they were, in their dining room, in a green-lawned Tennessee neighborhood, joking about what to call their first child. Jupiter was a perfect middle name — semi-secret, a nod to this wild gravitational pull.

Continued: https://www.statnews.com/2022/09/29/abortion-roe-tennessee-ban-fetal/

29.09.2022

Poland – What it’s like to live in a country with a near total ban on abortion

As the US teeters on the brink of outlawing abortion, an expert from Poland explains the practical and emotional consequences of such a ban

Katarzyna Wężyk
7 December 2021

openDemocracy asked me, as a Pole and the author of a book about abortion, to describe what it's like to live in a country with restricted reproductive rights.

In short: it’s lonely, humiliating, dangerous to life and health, and it undermines the rule of law. And it’s expensive.

Continued: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/5050/live-in-a-country-near-total-ban-abortion/

I was a walking grave: women describe impact of Malta’s abortion ban

Healthcare professionals feel helpless, unable to provide adequate care

Aug 9, 2021
Sarah Carabott

Maria* spent the last months of her pregnancy knowing the foetus she carried inside of her had an inverted heart and a hernia that had spread to its stomach.

Her obstetrician had told her the body would probably self-abort and there was nothing they could do in the meantime.

Continued: https://timesofmalta.com/articles/view/i-was-a-walking-grave-women-describe-impact-of-maltas-abortion-ban.892069

Europe’s underground abortion network

When terminations are banned in Poland, Polish women buy train tickets

Feb 27th 2021
The Economist

Wander around any Polish city and the same phone number pops up on an array of unlikely surfaces. It is scrawled on bus stops and billboards. It can be daubed on the side of a church. Head online and the same number (+48 222 922 597) appears in people’s usernames. Those who dial it are put through to Kobiety w Sieci (“Women on the Net”), a group that offers women information on how to get abortions. In a country where providing terminations is now, in effect, illegal, it is a useful number to have.

In October Poland’s constitutional court struck down a law allowing abortion in cases of fetal abnormality. Of the 1,000 or so legal abortions in Poland per year before the ban, nearly all were in this category. Now, abortion is limited to cases of rape or to save a mother’s life. This fulfils a long-held dream of Poland’s ruling Law and Justice party to clamp down on abortions. Activists responded by turning cities into a gonzo Yellow Pages.

Continued: https://www.economist.com/europe/2021/02/27/europes-underground-abortion-network

After Poland Issued a Near-Total Ban on Abortions, Marta Lempart Has Been on the Front Line of the Protests

BY MIRA PTACIN
February 11, 2021

It’s been called different things: the Coat Hanger Rebellion, Black Protests, Strajk Kobiet, or Women’s Strike. For half a decade, it’s continued to grow louder and stronger. Now, many are calling it a revolution: millions of Polish women, men, and children protesting the government and all-powerful Catholic Church’s continuous attempts at a near-total ban of abortion.

Over the past several years, Poland’s conservative Law and Justice Party (PiS) has introduced increasingly draconian restrictions on abortion access in the country. In 2016, a proposal was introduced that would ban nearly all abortions except those necessary to save a woman’s life. The citizens of Poland took to the streets, and the protests had a dramatic impact: The the PiS, which had previously championed the bill, voted the legislation down.

Continued: https://www.vogue.com/article/poland-abortion-marta-lempart

MEPs condemn Poland’s near-total abortion ban

Lawmakers tried to put pressure on Warsaw in parliamentary debate.

BY MAÏA DE LA BAUME
February 9, 2021

MEPs on Tuesday condemned Poland's almost total ban on abortion and called on the European Union to step up its fight against what they see as more backsliding on fundamental rights in the country.

Last month, Poland's top constitutional court published its reasoning on a verdict that tightened the country's already tough abortion laws. The verdict means abortions will be permitted only in cases of rape, incest and when a mother's life is endangered. The initial court ruling, issued in October, stated that abortions for reasons of fetal abnormality violate the constitution, which effectively banned most abortions in the country.

Continued: https://www.politico.eu/article/mep-condemn-poland-abortion-ban/

MEPs condemn Poland’s abortion law

European Parliament urges Warsaw to ‘refrain from any further attempts’ to restrict women’s sexual and reproductive health rights.

BY MAÏA DE LA BAUME
November 26, 2020

The European Parliament on Thursday overwhelmingly adopted a resolution that "strongly condemns" Poland's recent tightening of abortion rules and urges the government to "refrain from any further attempts" to restrict women's sexual and reproductive health rights.

A total of 455 MEPs voted in favor of the resolution (with 145 against) "on the de-facto ban on the right to abortion in Poland," weeks after millions of protesters took to the streets to protest a ruling from the country’s Constitutional Tribunal that abortions for reasons of fetal abnormality violate the Polish constitution.

Continued: https://www.politico.eu/article/meps-adopt-resolution-condemning-polands-abortion-bill/

26.11.2020

Poland Constitutional Tribunal

As Polish abortion laws tighten women fear an impossible choice

Her baby could not possibly survive. Still they decided she should have it

Kasia Strek, Warsaw | Peter Conradi

Saturday November 07 2020

Sitting on a hard plastic seat in the corridor of the Bielanski Hospital in
north Warsaw last week, waiting for her abortion pill to take effect,
Malgorzata quietly recounted her struggle to get a termination for a foetal
abnomality in a country bitterly divided over the sanctity of unborn life.

While huge crowds have been on the streets to oppose a hardening of Poland’s already
strict abortion laws, Malgorzata has had to travel from hospital to hospital to
find one willing to help her.

It was six weeks ago, during the 12th week of her pregnancy, that the
34-year-old businesswoman learnt there was something wrong with the baby she
was carrying: it was too small, did not move much and there was an abnormality
in the jawbone.

Continued: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/as-polish-abortion-laws-tighten-women-fear-an-impossible-choice-fbhgvj6gk