Thousands of Poles demonstrate against the country’s harsh abortion laws

After a lady in her fifth month of pregnancy died of sepsis, women’s rights activists called for rallies in dozens of Polish cities.

Thousands of people marched in Poland against the country’s stringent abortion law after a woman five months pregnant died of sepsis, the latest such death since the ban was tightened.

Protesters chanted “Stop killing us” as they marched through Warsaw’s capital towards the health ministry’s headquarters on Wednesday, some carrying placards reading “We want doctors, not missionaries” and “Hell for women,” a common slogan used to convey how the measure affects those carrying an unwanted or dangerous pregnancy.

Poland’s abortion laws, which are among the harshest in Europe, have sparked major protests in recent years, and the death of Dorota Lalik, 33, in May has fueled anti-government sentiment among many liberal Poles ahead of elections in October or November.

As conservative politics have progressively taken hold in one of Europe’s most devoutly Catholic countries, Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki’s nationalist administration implemented a constitutional court judgement prohibiting terminations of pregnancies with foetal malformations in 2021.

According to abortion rights campaigners, there were at least five incidents of pregnant women dying whose families went public, blaming abortion restrictions for their deaths.

When asked about the consequences of the tight abortion restriction, Mateusz Morawiecki cautioned against “politicising” the Lalik case.

“Such perinatal deaths occurred also during the Platforma Obywatelska [Civic Platform],” Morawiecki remarked on Wednesday, referring to the centrist opposition party that ruled before his conservative party won office in 2015.

Even before Morawiecki’s Prawo i Sprawiedliwo (Law and Justice) party came to office, Poland had one of the most stringent abortion laws in Europe.

Women have the right to abortion under present legislation only in circumstances of rape or incest, or if their life or health is in danger. This week, government officials emphasised that the law was not the cause of the woman’s death. They emphasised that in such instances, women have the right to a legal abortion, and that the hospital infringed that right.

Several women have perished since 2020, when the constitutional court declared that women may no longer abort pregnancies due to serious foetal defects.

Women’s rights groups claim that the present statute, as well as the wider conservative milieu, has chilling effects. Another issue, they claim, is doctors who refuse to perform abortions because of their moral conscience.

An inquiry into Lalik’s death has been launched by prosecutors. They are already investigating two similar incidents in which pregnant women died in hospital following the demise of the foetus they were carrying.

In 2021, her family criticised physicians’ “wait-and-see attitude” when a pregnant 30-year-old mother from Pszczyna died.

A year later, a 37-year-old lady died in Czestochowa, Poland, just weeks after losing her 12-week-old twin foetuses.

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