Polish Media Texts

This is a translation of the original Polish article, which can be found here. The translation is unauthorised, and is provided for educational, informational and non-commercial purposes only'

Checkmate Catholic right-wingers. It is your families in which abortions take place. Feminists are fighting for conservative women’s rights as well

Krzysztof Majak, NaTemat

There is nothing like lecturing others, and showing concern for their morality, while having a problem oneself. Maybe the right-wing and Catholics are so interested in abortion only because this topic is so well-known in their communities? Research leaves no doubt that mature women with conservative views most often have abortions, and not young women or rape victims, the ones whom they want to deny the right..

The right-wing and the Church are the ones who tend to tell the Polish people how to live. In the meantime, left-wing supporters say: live the life you want ­­— it is your choice to make. Also, let us live in the way we choose. However, it has finally become clear why the conservative communities are so eager to tighten the existing regulations on abortion: they know the abortion problem better than anyone.

A survey performed by the Centre for Public Opinion Research (which, was carried out before the Law and Justice party came to power) leaves no doubt. 3,576 Polish adult women were surveyed, and the fieldwork took half a year. Among the women with right-wing views, 35% had had an abortion at least once in their life. On the other hand, among those who consider themselves left wing, 27% had done so. And these results are just the beginning…

Such results do not surprise Prof. Magdalena Środa. “There is a whole mass of women who pledge that they are against abortion. However, when it is their child who gets pregnant, they seek the gynaecologist’s help. And when they have received such help… they are still opposed,” Magdalena Środa told naTemat. But what is the reason for such an attitude? According to Środa, it is certainly not because of their religious beliefs, but because of a ritual full of hypocrisy, in which lies Polish Catholicism.

 “Politicians declare that they are against abortion due to calculation. What matters most is what the bishops say about their decision. It is not a result of faith in Jesus Christ. The bishops say ‘no’ and the citizens repeat it” – Magdalena Środa.

Abortion, against which the church and the Law and Justice Party fight, is often chosen by women who are practising Catholics. But is this a reason for forbidding religious practice? I leave this question open, because since life, from the very conception till a natural death, is the most important thing, all means should be taken to prevent such a “crime”. If we give up compromises, let’s do so completely.

Let’s now answer the question of whose electorate these women constitute: elderly, less educated, and unhappy with their material status. It is these respondents who often declare at least one pregnancy termination.

“This is typical Polish hypocrisy,” claims the CEO of the Federation for Women and Family Planning, Krystyna Kacpura. According to her, the main reason for such a situation is the huge stigmatisation of abortion by Catholic communities. Meanwhile, it is the Catholic right-wingers who need education, and not the law that should be tightened. No law will ever stop or decrease the number of abortions, just push it further underground and into more dangerous conditions, says Kacpura.

Girls for girls

Anti-abortion groups often strive to present abortion as an act of impulse by young women who go to parties, have one-night stands, and make a dash to have an abortion. The truth of abortion is completely different. Professor Środa states, “Young girls have access to the Internet, where a lot of information about pregnancy prevention and contraceptives can be found. Pregnancies are terminated by women who are already mothers, have often produced large families, have a husband who drinks alcohol. Those women have unwanted pregnancies in their forties or fifties and are helpless.”

According to Professor Środa, the problem of abortion involves women who are ashamed to talk about their problems and, simultaneously, unthinkingly follow what their priests preach. Uneducated women, poor women, or women who are sexually abused in their relationships are prone to conceiving an unwanted child.

“This is not a problem of 16-year-olds. It is a problem of 25-year-olds, 40-year-olds. The question is what these women do with an unwanted pregnancy when they don’t have money for an abortion clinic and they don’t have access to abortifacient pills. I believe that in Poland there are a large number of infanticides,” says the philosopher from the ethics department at Warsaw University.

The young girls who go onto the streets to protest – who are educated and liberal, able to go abroad if they want to terminate a pregnancy, or to buy a morning-after pill – are really fighting for the lives of the women who stand on the other side of the barricades. The real victims of restrictive laws are those women who consider themselves conservative and religious.

Krystyna Kacpura says, “We today mobilise and fight precisely for these women, who are not aware of birth control, for whom unwanted pregnancy is a serious threat to their health or even life.”

Translated by: Zak Natalia Wojtun Anna Wozniczko Mikolaj