My Body, Your Choice

By Piotr Wimmers

A brief portrayal of the situation on the streets of Warsaw; tens of thousands of men and women dressed in black, the carrying of anti-government slogans held aloft on carton boards, the near total disruption of Warsaw infrastructure, the steadfast yet despairing cry for upholding women’s rights, and confident, sometimes even militantly looking female politicians exclaiming to the gathered party, ‘this line, they will not cross’. Sounds familiar? This is not a historical piece describing the 2016 protests against the proposal to enforce a strict abortion law, famously dubbed the “Black March”, but an illustration of the sad reality of what has been happening on the streets of Warsaw from the 22^nd, October 2020.

On that day, the Polish Constitutional Tribunal ruled that the current abortion law, strict as it may be already, is in direct conflict with the Polish Constitution of 1997, which states that ‘all life should be protected and respected’. Consequently, the ruling stated that abortion is now only permissible on two grounds, when the pregnancy constitutes a potentially lethal danger to the woman, or when the pregnancy has been the result of a criminal offence, such as rape or incest. However, this ruling crucially means that a woman cannot file for an abortion when the embryo has serious or lethal genetic defects which can be clearly deducted from prenatal screening. As a result, women are forced to carry on with pregnancies even if it is known that the newborn child does not have a chance to survive the first couple of weeks, days, or even childbirth itself.

This arguably inhumane ruling sparked a mass amount of protests on the streets of all major cities in Poland, headed by the organization Strajk Kobiet (Women’s Protest), which demanded a reversal in the ruling of the Constitutional Tribunal, and, since it was on the agenda anyway, a thorough liberalization of the abortion law, deemed by many women to be a product of a female oppressive doctrine conjured up by men in suits commanded by men in ecclesiastical robes. And indeed, it is hard not to sympathize with the women (and men) marching on the Warsaw streets in the pouring rain or the freezing cold, as they strike for what is widely believed to be a fundamental human right; the right to determine what happens in your own physical and mental dimensions. What is at stake here is a profound attack on the liberties of individuals, where the Polish state attempts to control not just the legislature, the media, the judicial apparatus (all have fallen), but now moves to control what is happening in the bodies and minds of Poles, a highly worrying authoritarian move.

Fundamentally, the discussion revolves around semantics, specifically on what is written in the Polish Constitution. When the socialist in 1997 wrote that “life should be protected and respected”, this pertained to lives of people already born, or at the very best referring to the final stages of the pregnancy. However, what the ruling PiS (Prawo i Sprawiedliwosc, Law and Justice) party claims, in concert with the highly influential Catholic Church doctrine, is that life begins not at the 24 week mark of pregnancy, or 12, or even 1, but at the moment of conception itself. This understanding is however, highly problematic, but not in the way that people should believe in it, that is a subjective discussion. Of course, devout Catholics in Poland have every right to think that life starts at conception, but the moment when this doctrine becomes implemented and forced upon all Poles, regardless of religious persuasion, this enforcement becomes a direct infringement on human rights, informed by religious dogma itself. Effectively, every single Pole is now, through Catholicism, forced to physically (and preferably even mentally) believe that life starts at conception. What of the hundreds of thousands, if not millions of Poles, predominantly youngsters, that are not spiritual at all? Why must an atheist Pole abide by Catholic rule? Surely, if this is the case, why not encroach on the human rights of flat-earthers as well?

The recent development in Poland are in line with the ever-growing polarization in Polish society, of which the violent attacks of far-right groups beating up otherwise peaceful protesters are but one symbolic example. What seems to be the case here is that the PiS party, as it traditionally has done, seeks to find an enemy to polarize society in order to distract it from profound contemporary problems; in 2015 the PiS party weaponized anti-Islam rhetoric in light of the Syrian refugee crisis; in 2019, the LGBT-movement was attacked by claiming that they were the product of the so-called “Gender-ideology”, which led to bizarre statements that this ideology was conceived by the West, in particular the historic arch-enemy to Polish nationalists, Germany. This ideology was meant to “destroy” Polish society by disrupting the “traditional Polish nuclear family unit”, that of man, woman and children, in an attempt to weaken Polish society as part of the historic German project to “exploit Poland”. Now, in light of the COVID pandemic and the sheer weakness and indecisiveness the Polish government is dealing with the situation, the PiS party found another enemy around which it can rally, Polish women. In an ostensibly brilliant piece of Realpolitik, the people protesting now are blamed to spread the virus, effectively transmitting the responsibility of handling the COVID pandemic from the government to the protesting people. It shows that true democracy and liberty is seriously endangered by PiS, which characterizes the problems post-Communist Poland has faced.