Polish women are declaring victory in a dramatic showdown that pitted them against an anti-abortion group and the conservative government this week.
Three days after the women donned black, boycotted work and staged giant street protests, lawmakers on Thursday voted overwhelming against a complete ban on abortion — a proposal they had supported just two weeks earlier.
The victory merely maintains the “status quo,” which is one of the most restrictive abortion laws in Europe, but feminists hope they have gained the momentum to attack that next.
Agnieszka Graff, a prominent feminist commentator, said she and other feminists have struggled in vain for years to reach younger Polish women, and that this was the first time she has seen them mobilized in huge numbers.
“The feeling on the street was revolutionary. Women were angry, but they were also elated at seeing how many of us there were. The black clothes created this secret-but-open signal that connected strangers on the street,” Graff said.
While the women protested to defend the current law, she believes there is a good chance the events might have the paradoxical result of creating “a whole generation of pro-choice women.”
Members of Poland’s ruling Law and Justice Party voted two weeks ago to consider the proposal — brought to the Polish parliament by an anti-abortion group — sending it to a parliamentary commission for further consideration. At the same time, they voted to refuse to consider a separate proposal to liberalize the law.
In a complete reversal, lawmakers voted 352-58 to reject the proposal. Law and Justice leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski warned lawmakers that further restrictions risked bringing about the “exact opposite effect.”
Whether the women activists are able to maintain their momentum remains to be seen.
However, certainly abortion is a matter of widespread debate in a way that it has not been since 1993, when the current law took force after difficult negotiations between religious and secular Poles.
Often referred to as a “compromise,” the law bans abortion in most cases, but does make exceptions in cases of rape or incest, when the woman’s life is in danger or the fetus is badly damaged.
The proposal for further tightening the law came from a citizens’ initiative that gathered about 450,000 signatures in a nation of 38 million. While supported by some conservative Catholics, it was highly unpopular with most Poles, with people balking at the idea that a teenage rape victim should be forced to have her baby, or that a woman whose health was badly compromised would be forced to carry to term.
The proposal also called for prison terms of up to five years for women who sought abortions. The only case in which a doctor could intervene in a woman’s pregnancy would be if the woman were dying and required an emergency intervention to save her life.
With abortion already illegal in most cases, many women said what frightened them the most in the proposal was that it could have led doctors to be afraid to perform prenatal tests or that women who suffered miscarriages could fall under criminal suspicion.
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