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Abortion in Poland: What will Tusk’s new day for women bring?

The new Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk has promised a liberalization of the country’s abortion laws, which are some of the most restrictive on the European continent. His path is a sharp contrast to the previous government’s anti-abortion crackdown. Yet, even as he commits to the issue publicly, the campaign he took to get there reveals that reproductive freedom in Poland remains an issue many lawmakers use only instrumentally.

Hot water, running over a pregnant belly, under beige and purple shower tiles. An orange cat, crawling through the litter box. Only a couple months after abortion doula Wiktoria Szymczak moved to Kraków from Warsaw in 2023, she was helping a stranger end a pregnancy in her apartment bathroom. Earlier in the day, Szymczak had got a call from a client who needed more help than anticipated, who we will call Agata to protect her privacy. Previously, Szymczak had told her how to pursue one of the few legal methods left for obtaining an abortion within the country. It is still legal to go online and order abortion pills for yourself in the mail through a dealer based outside Poland (Szymczak recommends medical non-profits like “Women Help Women”). Agata went online and she bought the pills to end her pregnancy.

February 7, 2024 - Katie Toth - Issue 1-2 2024MagazineStories and ideas

A protest in Wrocław in October 2020 against the anti-abortion measures forced by the then Polish government under the Law and Justice party. Photo: Lena Ivanova / Shutterstock

But “she miscalculated”, Szymczak recalls. The pregnancy was further along than they thought and they were going to need more medication to end it. “As an abortion doula, I obviously have the pills at home,” she says. But Szymczak is also a newly-practicing lawyer, and she brings her fresh knowledge of Poland’s legal landscape into her activism. So as a doula who collaborates with other abortion activists, she had a strict rule for herself and others on her team: you never give out your own abortion pills to a client in Poland. “You hold their hand or support them while they order their own.” When you give the pills to someone else, you are putting unregistered drugs into Polish circulation – and that crosses a legal line. “I am always the one making sure nobody does stupid things that can get them arrested,” she says.

Risks

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