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'

Should we fear a dispute over abortion?

Artur Karnikowski, Niezależna

Twenty years have passed since the times when abortion was the main topic of political debate in Poland. When the anti-abortion laws were tightened in 1993, it resulted in massive protests from left and centre-left parts of society. Politicians, cultural figures and artists called for a referendum to enable Polish citizens to have their say on the legality of termination of pregnancy.

Rock bands recorded songs about Catholic hypocrisy and restrictive regulations; tapes with the top artists of the time were released, with profits supposed to support the campaign for a referendum. Finally, a proposal for carrying out the referendum, signed by 1.7 million people, was submitted to parliament, yet was not even examined. After the overthrow of the government of Jan Olszewski and the blocking of lustration, the parliamentary majority of the time had to show voters in other ways its affiliation to the centre-right and right as well as to Christian values.

Absolute evil

From the referendum uprising, however, no social movement arose. The important political figures connected with it gradually softened their positions or lost interest in the subject. In 1995, during the electoral campaign, Aleksander Kwaśniewski declared his support for abortion for social reasons. However, as the president, he limited himself to a declaring attachment to the abortion compromise, which is the ban with three exceptions stated in the act of 1993, in order to announce his veto in 2004 concerning the possible extension of the list of exceptions for social reasons. In the meantime, in 1996 post-communists liberalized the antiabortion act, allowing the difficult material status of a family as sufficient reason for killing a child. However, this change was challenged by the Constitutional Tribunal. Afterwards, the discussion about abortion was not beneficial to Democratic Left Alliance (SLD), because the left-wing needed the support of the Church with regard to Poland’s accession to the European Union. Finally, came the year 2005 – the great national retreat following the death of John Paul II and the great election victory for a party which had declared attachment to the right-wing camp. Since then, no changes to the regulations have been proposed in the direction of greater permissibility of abortion, apart from by feminists, who are increasingly alienated and treated less seriously.

If in 1993 liberals could still hope for a victory (though certainly by a small majority of votes) in a referendum concerning the acceptability of the killing of unborn children, in later years social acceptance of abortion decreased. Although, according to various studies, the majority of the population approves of the exceptions included in existing laws (especially those regarding the mother's health and life), more and more people say that abortion is an absolute evil in every case. Finally – probably due to the publicity this subject has received – more and more people are against killing children who could be born sick. The trend is clear and is additionally emphasised by the greater moral conservatism of the younger generation, which has greater awareness of the moral dimensions of abortion than their parents or grandparents. We have to remember that during the times of the [communist-era] People's Republic of Poland, particularly before the pontificate of John Paul II, social acceptance of abortion was greater than today and this way of thinking can be reflected into the views of some older respondents.

Dying in agony before the doctors’ eyes

Nevertheless, throughout the years a significant section of right-wing politicians feared disturbing the compromise of 2003 [sic – 1993]. This way of thinking is clearly visible in Jarosław Gowin’s statement from 2012, when he was the minister of justice in the Civic Platform [Poland’s largest centrist party] government: “Nobody can be forced into heroism; if in this [parliamentary] term the pendulum were to swing to the right, in the next it would go radically to the left.”. Even in 2007, in the final months of the Law and Justice [the main conservative party] government, they failed to add to the constitution an amendment on the protection of human life from conception. At that moment, most Civic Platform’s MPs were already against such a change.

Less than a year ago, the media, particularly the weekly Wprost and its columnist Magdalena Rigamonti, unleashed a smear campaign against Bogdan Chazan, the director of the Warsaw’s Hospital of the Holy Family, who, invoking the conscience clause, refused to perform an abortion. Chazan, as we now know, was dismissed for not having carried out his duties. Meanwhile, in a hospital which used to have a reputation as a pro-life institution, abortions started to be performed again. In March, the clinic once again hit the headlines, because of a dramatic situation that took place in the hospital: as a result of a poorly performed abortion, a child was born, but did not receive help and so died in agony. The case, which is now under investigation, appalled the public, and the Catholic Church, through Cardinal Kazimierz Nycz, reflected on whether the clinic should keep the name of the Holy Family. In these dramatic circumstances, the debate over ill children’s right to live came back to life.

The minister of health, Konstanty Radziwił, commented on TVN24 [one of the main Polish commercial TV channels]: “There is no reason to kill a baby which is ill. On the contrary, it needs even more help from us. There is also no reason to kill the baby of an ill mother. Although such a child cannot live on its own outside its mother’s womb, that does not mean that the mother can decide on its life or death.”  

Social climate prompts changes

Officially, Law and Justice promises that it will address a social draft law regarding a complete ban on abortion submitted by the defenders of life. However, it is heard unofficially that the ruling party is afraid of a potential dispute around this subject and is trying to back away from the initiative. Regardless of whether these reports are true, it is worth mentioning that such concerns seem to be quite unwarranted. The social climate prompts change, especially when the elements of existing solutions which meet with no greater objections are retained, i.e. regarding the mother’s life being threatened. Taking a clear stance against the ban on abortion will be good neither for Civic Platform, which has been manoeuvring around the subject, nor, for similar reasons, for members of the Committee for the Defence of Democracy, though some of them may include pro-abortion rhetoric in their actions. What is more, it seems to be quite possible to gain a constitutional majority in the current parliament which will write into the Basic Law something that was impossible to do nine years ago. So, maybe it is worth taking the risk?

Today, the risk that Jarosław Gowin was so concerned about in his time appears to be negligible. Although Adrian Zandberg, from [the new left-wing political party] Razem (Together), writes on Twitter that ‘Forcing women to give birth to a severely disabled fetus is barbarity. It gives me goosebumps to consider the minister of health as a Talib’, there is no indication that the left, old or young, will come to power in Poland in the next few years. Neither the social moods nor the situation in Europe seem to be conducive to this. The migration crisis and the threat of terrorism will not bring to power a party whose recipe for improvement means reaching for even more unproven and disgraceful solutions, multiculturalism and political correctness. However, if someday we witness the triumphal return to power of supporters of murdering ‘severely disabled fetuses’, the tightening of current laws will not affect their legislative actions. Until then, however, many lives can be saved.
 

Translated by: TAngelika Bień, Krzysztof Celej, Matylda Czapor