Polish parliament votes to send abortion bills to special commission

By Jo Harper

WARSAW (AA) – The Polish parliament voted Friday to send four abortion bills to a special commission.

After weeks of delay, the move is widely seen as a test for the new government made up of a coalition of center, left and agrarian parties, the latter of which has dragged its feet in the still deeply traditional Catholic country.

Two of the bills are aimed at legalizing abortion up to the 12th week of pregnancy. Another decriminalizes abortion in certain cases, while the fourth seeks a return to strict 1993 laws.

Prime Minister Donald Tusk said after the vote that “this shows that we are definitely going in the right direction.”

The commission will have 27 members: the main opposition party, Law and Justice (PiS) will have 11; Tusk’s Civic Coalition (KO) nine, Polska 2050, PSL and Left two each and far-right Confederation one.​​​​​​​

Poland has some of the EU’s strictest abortion laws, which were further tightened under the previous right-wing government.

If the bills are approved by parliament, President, Andrzej Duda, aligned with PiS, is unlikely to sign them into law.

In March, Duda vetoed legislation providing prescription-free emergency contraception to girls and women aged 15.

-Liberal-left happy

Robert Biedron, an MEP from the New Left, the smallest of the coalition parties, said the country must become “more European” on abortion rights. “This is good news, especially for Polish women who have been fighting for their rights for 30 years. We keep working!” he told reporters Friday.

The European Parliament urged Warsaw to change its abortion policies on Thursday. It encouraged all member states “to fully decriminalize abortion in line with the 2022 WHO guidelines, and to remove and combat obstacles to safe and legal abortion.”

“Today is a very happy day for Polish women!” wrote Malgorzata Tracz, an MP for the Greens. Poland’s Federation for Women and Family Planning described the debate as a “massive test” of how MPs saw women’s rights.

“The state can’t pretend that abortion doesn’t exist - they’re being done, always have and always will,” Katarzyna Kotula, equality minister, told parliament. “The state must do all it can to ensure that abortion is safe, accessible, legal and takes place under appropriate conditions,” she added.

-Center keeps its word

“We promised to stop arguing and we kept our word,” wrote the Parliament Speaker Szymon Holownia, from the Third Way grouping, the second largest coalition party that has not been a supporter of abortion reform since the ruling coalition came to power late last year.

“We believe the greatest chance for change is provided by a referendum, but we voted for all the projects,” he said. “We did this out of respect for democracy and concern for the durability of the coalition. Now we leave the fate of these bills in the hands of the committee members.”

In local elections last weekend, PiS won 34% of the vote to the ruling coalition’s 30%, putting extra pressure on the governing coalition.

-Church not happy

Tadeusz Wojda, president of the Polish Bishops’ Conference, wrote Friday: “I urgently ask all people of good will to care for the lives of unborn children and their mothers, to oppose the culture of exclusion, which deprives the most defenseless and weak people of their fundamental right: the right to life.”