Protests gathered across Poland after the Constitutional Tribunal ruled on Thursday that abortion due to foetal defects was unconstitutional, banning the most common of the few legal grounds for ending a pregnancy in the largely Catholic country.
After the ruling goes into effect, abortion will only be permissible in Poland in the case of rape, incest or a threat to the mother's health and life, which make up only about 2% of legal terminations conducted in recent years.
The development pushes Poland further away from the European mainstream, as the only EU country apart from tiny Malta to severely restrict access to abortion.
The ruling sparked protests across the country. Thousands took to the streets in major Polish cities.
The biggest protest took place in Warsaw, where the crowd marched from the seat of the Constitutional Tribunal to the Law and Justice party headquarters, and later a smaller group gathered on Mickiewicza street. They planned to go in front of Jarosław Kaczyński's home, but the building was cordoned off by the police. A small scuffle broke out and some 15 people got arrested.
"The Constitutional Tribunal has taken away my right to decide about my own body, and every woman should have such right. To me it's pure barbarism" - said a protester in Kraków.
"We refuse to let PiS decide for us to give birth to dead babies and suffer for nine months" - another protester said.
One of the protesters in Szczecin said: "PiS have used the Constitutional Tribunal to introduce a draconian, inhuman law, that leaves us women without an option to terminate pregnancy due to foetus defects". "They have put us in a really abject situation, officially we can't even protest," she added, referring to the fact the controversial ruling has been issued during the ongoing pandemic, under a ban on public gatherings.
Źródło: TVN24 News in English, tvn24.pl, Reuters