Human rights organisations say Poland’s abortion law has had “devastating” consequences as news broke of another pregnant mother whose death has been blamed on the near-total ban.
Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the World Organisation Against Torture and several other groups released a Jan. 26 joint statement a year after the new restrictions came into effect.
The Catholic country already had one of Europe’s most restrictive abortion laws when the Constitutional Court sided with the populist right-wing government to rule that terminations over foetal defects were unconstitutional.
The verdict “has had a devastating impact on the lives of women and all those in need of abortion care,” the rights groups said.
“The ruling has increased the extreme barriers women seeking access to abortion face and has had tragic consequences for many of them and their families.”
The NGOs said that more than 1,000 women have already turned to the European Court of Human Rights to challenge the law.
The abortion ban kills. Each and everyone who supports it has the blood of yet another person on their hands today
All abortion is now banned in Poland except in cases of rape and incest, or when the mother’s life or health are considered to be at risk.
The government has justified the ban as a means to halt “eugenic abortions”, pointing to terminations of foetuses diagnosed with Down’s Syndrome, but activists say it forces women to carry non-viable pregnancies.
Last year, tens of thousands of Poles demonstrated after a 30-year-old woman died of sepsis following the death of her foetus.
Her family called her the first victim of the termination ban, claiming doctors “took a wait-and-see attitude” because of the new rules limiting the possibility of a legal abortion.
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On Tuesday, another woman — 37-year-old Agnieszka T. — fell victim to the abortion law, according to her family, who believe she also died of sepsis.
The mother-of-three landed in the hospital after complaining of stomach pain and other symptoms while pregnant with twins. One of the foetuses later died.
“Unfortunately removing the dead foetus was not allowed because Polish law strictly forbids it. They waited until the vital functions of the other twin flatlined on their own” a week later, the family said on Facebook.
“Yet another pregnant, innocent young woman, mother and wife, has died.”
Her death prompted outrage from opposition politicians as well as women’s rights activists, who have announced a protest Wednesday outside the Constitutional Court in Warsaw.
“The abortion ban kills. Each and everyone who supports it has the blood of yet another person on their hands today,” the organisers said in a statement.
Even before the law was tightened, fewer than 2,000 legal abortions were carried out in Poland every year while an additional 200,000 women terminated pregnancies either illegally or abroad, according to women’s groups.
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