Global Courant
Women’s rights advocates called for protests under the slogan “Stop killing us” in dozens of Polish cities on Wednesday after a woman died of sepsis in her fifth month of pregnancy, the latest death since a tightening of Poland’s abortion law.
The protests demanding a liberalization of the abortion law will take place in the afternoon and evening in the capital and in nearly 50 other cities.
The 33-year-old woman died last month at John Paul II Hospital in Nowy Targ in southern Poland. It is a hospital in a very conservative region of the predominantly Catholic country. The hospital contains relics of the late Polish pope and Polish media have reported that it never performs abortions as a matter of principle.
The woman, Dorota Lalik, arrived there after her water broke and was told to lie down with her legs elevated as the medics hoped her fluids would be reconstituted. She developed sepsis and died three days later on May 24.
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Under current law, women are only entitled to an abortion in cases of rape or incest or if their life or health is threatened. State authorities this week stressed that the law was not the woman’s cause of death. They said women have the right to legal abortion in such cases and that the hospital violated its right to legal abortion.
“Such perinatal deaths also occurred in the Civic Platform era,” Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki said on Wednesday, referring to the centrist opposition party that preceded him before his right-wing party took over in 2015.
A woman holds a candle during a silent protest to commemorate a Polish woman who died while pregnant in May, in Berlin, Germany, on June 13, 2023. (AP Photo/Markus Schreiber)
Even before Morawiecki’s Law and Justice party came to power, the abortion law was one of the strictest in Europe.
Women’s rights advocates claim the current law has had a particularly chilling effect, warning that doctors are endangering women’s lives because they prioritize saving fetuses over women, either for ideological reasons or for fear of legal repercussions against themselves .
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The government and anti-abortion groups counter that these are medical errors that shouldn’t happen, but have nothing to do with the new law. They accuse the pro-choice side of politicizing tragic deaths in their political struggles.
Several women have since died after the Constitutional Court ruled in 2020 that women could no longer terminate pregnancies in the event of serious fetal malformations. Since then there have been cases of threatened pregnancies, but the doctors preferred to wait until the fetus had no heartbeat than to perform an abortion.
Critics of the current laws also argue that another problem is that doctors refuse to perform abortions on the grounds of their moral conscience.
The liberal daily Gazeta Wyborcza wrote on Wednesday that the so-called conscience clause is used not only by individual doctors, but even by entire healthcare facilities, including the one where Lalik died.
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“The institution of the conscience clause, since it leads to death, should be abolished,” the paper argued.
A left-wing MP called on parliament on Tuesday to stand up and observe a moment of silence in honor of the late woman. Legislators from the right-wing ruling party failed to hold their own.
