History of the ban: How polkas are fighting for the right to abortion
Text: Ksyusha Petrova
Black Monday is again in Poland today: women dressed in mourning clothes took to the streets of Warsaw and other cities with protest demonstrations, urging the government to abandon anti-abortion laws and an extremely conservative family policy. We have already talked with the participants of the protests and told us what the ban on abortions in different countries led to (in short, nothing good). While the Polk women continue to fight for their reproductive rights, we decided to restore the sequence of events - from the moment when the Polish authorities took the first steps to restrict abortions, to the thousands of “black protests” that recently captured the whole country.
January 1993: Prohibition of abortion
In 1993, the Polish Parliament passed the “Law on Family Planning, Fetal Protection and Termination of Pregnancy”. This document was considered a conditional compromise between the secular authorities and the Catholic Church, which possessed great political power. Termination of pregnancy was permitted in three cases: if it threatens the life or health of the woman, if medical research shows that the child is born with a serious and irreversible defect or incurable disease that threatens his life, and if conception occurred as a result of rape. The law provided penalties for doctors conducting abortion operations, as well as anyone who inclined a woman to such a decision or helped with the organization of an abortion. The abortion patients themselves were not prosecuted. Interestingly, the lack of punishment for women was one of the demands of Catholics.
So Poland became one of the few countries where, after a long period of liberal abortion policies, abortion operations were again banned. Four years after the epochal "Family Planning Act", the situation improved briefly: in 1997, Parliament approved an amendment that allows terminating a pregnancy not only for medical reasons, but also in the case of the poor financial situation of the mother. After the adoption of the new law, the number of legal abortions sharply increased, but after a year and a half the Constitutional Court canceled the amendment, and the abortions again went into the “gray zone”.
October 2015: Conservative turn
According to official data, in Poland there are about a thousand abortions per year - however, even supporters of the ban admit that in fact there are many more. The system of legal abortions is cumbersome: even if there are legal grounds, it is very difficult to get permission from doctors (according to the law, abortion must be given direction). Doctors are afraid to go on trial, so they are often delayed in making a decision - until the gestation period is too big for an abortion. There is also a tacit rule that allows Catholic doctors not to conduct surgery on religious grounds, even if there are medical indications.
In October 2015, the conservative law and justice party came to power, which was closely associated with the Catholic Church. In the elections to the Seimas, the party received 235 mandates out of 460, which allowed it to form a one-party majority government for the first time since the fall of the communist regime.
The first signs of an even more serious threat to the reproductive rights of Polish women appeared in April of this year: representatives of the episcopate sent a formal appeal to the government in which they proposed to completely ban abortions. The idea was supported by the secular authorities: Prime Minister Beata Szydlot and the leader of the Rights and Justice Jaroslav Kaczynski said they were ready to promote the relevant law, despite the possible consequences. At the same time, the first protest action took place on the streets of Warsaw. Polka came to the demonstration, carrying wire hangers over their heads, symbols of barbaric samoaborts, to which desperate women in different countries resorted. Even parishioners joined the protests - several clips appeared on the Internet, which show how women leave the church when the priests begin to talk about the sinfulness of not motherhood.
September 2016: The threat of a complete ban on abortion
On September 23 of this year, the deputies of the Polish Seym adopted in first reading a bill of the prolifera organization Ordo Iuris, which completely prohibits abortion. The document established prison sentences for professional doctors and all people who assist in the procedure, as well as for the mothers themselves. The maximum sentence was five years.
The position of the Polish authorities in relation to abortions was clarified even earlier: exactly one day before the approval of the first version of the law on the complete prohibition of abortions, the Saeima rejected a project on the legalization of abortion up to 12 weeks proposed by the opposition organization Save the Women.
October 2016: Black Monday
The prospect of the final deprivation of women’s right to choose was mobilized by opposition parties, feminist organizations and ordinary margins not participating in political life. Popular actress Kristina Janda proposed not just a protest march, but a national strike of women, as the Icelanders did in 1975. The idea was quickly picked up by activists and users of social networks: representatives of the new left-wing political party Razem ("Together") suggested that the participants of protest actions should dress in black as a sign of mourning for the victims of the restrictive law. The #czarnyprotest tag quickly became viral, and not only Polish women joined the rally, but also women all over the world - dressing in black, even those who could not go to the demonstrations, expressed their solidarity with the protesters.
October 3 in Poland was announced "Black Monday": thousands of women took time off or simply did not go to work, instead taking to the streets. Despite the rain, the center of Warsaw, Krakow, Poznan, Szczecin and Gdansk was flooded with crowds of people in black calling on the state to ensure the right of women to dispose of their bodies themselves. Journalists immediately called the action "umbrella revolution" - a seemingly harmless object turned into a symbol of the struggle for women's rights.
The scale of the protests made a strong impression on the authorities. On October 6, at an emergency meeting of the parliament, it was decided to abandon further consideration of the draft law on a total ban on abortions.
October 2016: Continuing the fight
Although the Polka won this battle, it soon became clear that Jaroslav Kaczynski and other authorities were not ready to abandon their conservative position. "We strive to ensure that even those pregnancies that are difficult when the child is doomed to death or have serious pathologies are brought to the end in order to baptize the child, bury it and give it a name," the leader of the ruling party said October 12.
Perturbed by Kaczynski’s words, the participants in the “black protest” decided to hold another “Black Monday”. The strike under the slogan "We will not close our umbrellas" is taking place today, October 24th. Since then, the movement for the right of women to have an abortion has its own organizational structures and voluntary associations that help coordinate actions in different cities. The protest’s attempt by the Polish trade union Solidarity to bring to justice the protesters responded with a flashmob in social networks: users post their photos with the caption “Organizer is me”. Now there are more than ten thousand such confessions.
According to a poll conducted by the newspaper Rzeczpospolita, 69% of Poles support the "black protest", which was organized by women. The main demands of the protesters, who deliberately do not consider themselves to be any political or civil organization (activists, schoolgirls, elderly, Catholics and representatives of other faiths took part in the "black protest") to ensure the right of women to dispose of their bodies and to get rid of the influence of the Catholic Church on family politics, culture and education.