Thousands of Polish women are
set to strike on Monday (3 October) against a proposal to further restrict
their right to abortion.
Social media activists say
they will form a human chain of black-clad women around the Palace of Culture
in an effort to reclaim the “phallic symbol of Warsaw”, women cyclists will
block the streets of Wroclaw, and women have threatened to withdraw all their
savings from banks.
Companies, universities and
city councils including Czestochowa, Gdansk, Lodz, Poznan and Warsaw have given
women employees and students the green light to strike.
Those who weren’t able to take
the day off - teachers, for instance - can protest by donning a black dress or
pinning a black ribbon to their outfit.
Poland already has one of the
strictest abortion regimes in the world.
Women can legally have an
abortion when the life or health of the mother is at risk, when the foetus is
malformed, or when the pregnancy is the result of a sex crime.
MPs are currently examining a
bill, brought to them by a citizens’ initiative last Friday, which would
tighten the law further by banning tests on the health of a foetus.
The bill also suggests
punishing women who abort and anyone who helps them with a prison sentence of
between three months and five years.
It has been the subject of tense debate for months,
but was only recently put on parliament's agenda. MPs voted to debate it
further.
’Icelandic strike’
Monday’s rebellion was
sparked when award-winning actress Krystyna Janda posted on social media a news
story on a 1975 initiative taken by Icelandic women in protest at wage
discrimination.
Some 90 percent of
Iceland’s women boycotted work, refused to cook and ignored their children for
a day, which went down in history as the "long Friday".
Fans of Janda quickly
organised a Facebook event, to which hundreds of thousands of women have been
invited.
"I read the
proposal and realised that with such a bill, I would have been dead since
1980," Janda
said in an interview.
“I struggled so hard to
get my children, twice doctors had to save my life in the last minute because
of ectopic pregnancies [when the foetus develops outside the womb],” she said.
Proponents of the
proposal, a group of religious lawyers from the think tank Ordo Iuris, say
people have misunderstood their intentions.
“The aim is to stop
discrimination against children before they are born,” Joanna Banasiuk, an Opus
Dei affiliated assistant professor of law, told parliament when presenting the
initiative.
Order Iuris promises the
project won’t end health checks and send women to jail for miscarriages.
But critics are not reassured.
Abortion underground
Feminist activist
Agnieszka Graff told this website the current laws were so strict that they
already amounted to a de facto ban.
The latest available
figures say 1,812 legal abortions were carried out in 2014. Pro-choice organisations
estimate that some 50,000 to 200,000 illegal procedures are carried out every
year.
“A majority of people
supported the ban, while the government let the abortion 'underground' work in
peace,” Graff said.
“Women were being
humiliated, of course, and had to foot the bill. But they didn’t die, so there
was no public outrage.”
If MPs push the bill
through, the state will have to crack down on the underground, she said.
“Doctors won’t even
refer women for pre-natal testing because this could be seen as facilitating
abortions,” Graff predicted.
She described it as an
“inhuman proposal” with almost no support, even from the conservative Law and
Justice (PiS) government. However, she said PiS were likely to back it because
they “owed” their right-wing Catholic supporters.
Protests and plenary debate
A poll published last
Friday showed that 15 percent of Poles would like to take part in Monday’s
strike and that another 35 percent supported the idea. Fourteen percent were
against, while the rest were undecided or didn’t care.
The survey also showed
that only 11 percent of the population backed the abortion ban. As many PiS
voters - 24 percent - want to liberalise the current law as those who wanted to
tighten it.
More than 150 events
will take place in big cities and small towns on Monday, with another 50 abroad
- including one in Iceland. Some started over the weekend.
Thousands of black-clad
protesters went through Lodz and even more gathered outside the Polish
parliament in Warsaw.
Women displayed signs of
solidarity, but also rage.
“PiS off”, “You cun’t”,
“I am so angry that I even went to a protest”, their placards said.
They were angry with PiS
and the other parties in the Polish parliament, which they said didn't stand up
for women's rights.
“Where were you for
eight years,” they shouted at politicians from the Civic Platform (PO),
including former prime minister Ewa Kopacz, who came to the protest.
The European Parliament
will also debate Polish women’s plight on Wednesday.
Poland’s prime minister
Beata Szydlo said that the EU had not drawn lessons from Brexit and kept on
"dealing with made-up problems".
Janusz Lewandowski,
Civic Platform’s leader in the European Parliament, also said the issue
“doesn’t fall under the EU treaties”.
But Malin Bjork, a
Swedish far-left MEP who was one of the initiative-takers to the debate, told
EUobserver that the parliament was "not just a legislative organ, but also
one that forms public opinion".
Graff, the Polish
feminist, said the EU had too long treated Poland’s almost total clampdown on
women’s rights as “cultural diversity”.
“Maybe it’s wishful
thinking from my side, but I hope this is the moment when liberal Europe
realises it must start defending itself,” she said.
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