Poland Enacts Ban on Most Abortions

The government of Poland announced Wednesday the country is implementing a ruling that will ban most abortions save for those in cases of rape, incest, and when the mother’s life or health is endangered.

The ruling occurred three months ago and will be published now in the Journal of Laws, said a tweet from Poland’s government information center, reported the Daily Mail.

In October, Poland’s Constitutional Court ruled against ending pregnancies due to disabilities, which had been an exception to the country’s already existing restrictions on abortions and the most common reason for the procedure.

Catholic News Agency reported in April that Poland’s parliament was weighing a bill, which citizens introduced, to ban abortions sought because of a prenatal diagnosis of a disability.

Approximately 830,000 citizens signed the petition to bring the bill forward.

“I believe that killing disabled children is simply murder,” Poland President Andrzej Duda told the Catholic media outlet Niedziela, according to Reuters.

The Daily Mail reported on the influence of a strong culture of life in the largely Roman Catholic country, which those on the left have protested as they carry European Union and LGBT rainbow flags “to show their support for liberal Western values.”

A group called the Women’s Strike organized nationwide protests against the abortion ban, which police have reminded them are illegal due to the coronavirus pandemic.

Breitbart News reported in October that abortion rights activists interrupted Masses in churches throughout Poland to protest the High Court’s 11-2 ruling outlawing abortions of disabled babies:

In its decision, the court argued that aborting a child because of probable birth defects constituted eugenics, an effort to cull out the weak and undesirable in a society, notoriously practiced by the Nazis against Jews and disabled persons, and by Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger against blacks and minorities in the United States.

The Court said aborting an unborn baby due to a disability violates constitutional protections of the right to life.

There can be “no protection of the dignity of an individual without the protection of life,” the Court said, adding that making an unborn child’s right to life conditional on its health established a form of illegal discrimination.