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.
March 3, 2026
Warsaw (AFP) – A Polish court on Tuesday sentenced three doctors to prison sentences over the 2021 death of a pregnant woman, which sparked nationwide protests and renewed scrutiny of the country's restrictive abortion laws.
The woman, Izabela, whose last name has not been made public, died of sepsis in 2021 while experiencing complications in the 22nd week of pregnancy. Her death came a year after a law toughening abortion restrictions in the mainly Catholic country came into effect and reignited mass protests.
Continued: https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20260303-polish-doctors-jailed-for-denying-woman-abortion
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."
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.
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.
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.
Orla Barry, The World
June 2, 2025
Podcast: 4 minutes
Poland has elected a new conservative nationalist as president in a major blow to Prime Minister Donald Tusk. Karol Nawrocki won the election by a razor thin margin. The result threatens to derail Tusk’s promise to ease Poland’s near-total abortion ban and reform the country’s judiciary. The World’s Europe Correspondent Orla Barry joins Host Carolyn Beeler.
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.
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.
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