Polish women and abortion advocators assembled at a court house in Warsaw on Sunday, October 30 to protest the legal proceedings against Justyna Wydrzynska, a woman who illegally provided a pregnant woman with prohibited abortion pills. Wydrzynska could face up to three years in prison for violating the illiberal abortion laws of the democratic nation.
The press interviewed Wydrzynska at court, and she expressed her lack of guilt confidently as she stated, “I didn’t think I would be this nervous but I am. As I head into court I don’t feel any guilt. I believe what I did was good, you have to help people..” Monika Siedrazka reported.
Justyna’s 18 year old daughter Sylvia also talked to the media and revealed there’s a lack of sex education in Polish schools, specifically where she frequents. The taboos against sex and body autonomy prevents students from expressing their impressions towards sex and the topic in general. In Sylvia’s words, “once in religion class we bought up the subject of abortion with our pastor, he didn’t even allow us to give our own opinion. Whenever the topic comes up, it’s shut down as quickly as possible.”
The U.S. Department of State 2021 Report on International Religious Freedom in Poland found that almost 85% of the country’s population identifies as Roman Catholic, to put into perspective.
Justina is one of the founders and member of a support network called Abortion Dream Team Group in Poland. The organization provides guidelines and information to Polish women who wish to terminate their pregnancies, by directing them to websites where they can obtain medical abortion pills. These medications are internationally imported from other European countries, and are delivered to the location provided by the seeker.
“We never distribute medication ourselves, we only provide information”– Justyna Wydrzynska.
Poland’s current abortion restrictions came into full effect in 2020. In January 2022, Agnieszka, a 37-year-old mother of three died after being forced to carry a dead fetus for over a week before removal. She was pregnant with twins, but one of them died late in December 2021. The doctors waited to examine the state of the living twin, who subsequently died a week after the first.
In 2021, the Members of the European Parliament (MEP’s) condemned the October 2020 Polish Constitutional Tribunal ruling that imposed a near total ban on abortion. The ruling declared the 1993 Act on Conditions of Termination of Pregnancy unconstitutional. The act, according to the European Parliament’s reports, permitted abortions “to take place in cases where a prenatal test or other medical considerations had indicated a high probability of a severe and irreversible fetal defect or an incurable illness that threatened the fetus’ life.”
Thought the EP’s publishing only emphasized the health of the fetus as the basis for abortion in the 1993 act, the National Library of Medicine, also published that, “under this law, abortion is allowed only when there is justifiable suspicion that the pregnancy constitutes a threat to the life or a serious threat to the health of the mother, that the fetus is irreversibly damaged, or that the pregnancy resulted from an illegal act.”
Poland’s abortions laws are among the strictest in the European Union. Until 2020, women were allowed to terminate pregnancies due to health complications from both mother and fetus. Now that the 1993 conditions have been reversed and deemed unconstitutional, legal abortions are solely implemented when the vitals of the fetus have flatlined on their own, or if the pregnancy is a result of rape and incest.