Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I am president of the Foundation for Women and Family Planning, which is the very first Polish NGO leading the process of advancement of sexual and reproductive health and rights in Poland. It was established in 1991. Since then, we have been monitoring the implementation of the law and advocating for the liberalization and decriminalization of abortion.
Since the outbreak of the war in Ukraine, FEDERA—which is the short form for our organization—has provided help accessing SRHR for women and girls from Ukraine. Moreover, we take part in various advocacy initiatives, along with the international NGOs and partners, ensuring a SRHR and GBV response for the refugees.
The very purpose for the creation of FEDERA was the existence and counterbalance of the consequences of Polish women’s gradual loss of autonomy in access to legal abortion care. For almost 30 years, the law allowed access to abortion under three minimum grounds, as stipulated in the act of January 1993 on family planning, human embryo protection and conditions of legal pregnancy termination.
In October 2020, things got worse by means of the political Constitutional Tribunal’s ruling. The Constitutional Tribunal found that certain provisions of the act that provide for the legality of women’s access to abortion care are unconstitutional, specifically on the grounds of fetal abnormalities. The tribunal’s decision came into effect in January 2021. It has severely rolled back the already severely limited protection for women’s access to legal abortion in Poland, and resulted in a near total ban on abortion.
Apart from almost no access to legal abortion, there is limited access to contraception, especially emergency contraception. Polish teenagers suffer from a lack of comprehensive sexuality education.
We cannot look at what is happening in Poland with regard to SRHR backsliding without considering the impact of the transnational antigender movement, which is quite powerful in Poland and operates in synergy with the current ultra-conservative government.
The regressive ruling is contrary to Poland’s obligations under international human rights treaties and the European Convention on Human Rights. As a state party to seven international human rights treaties, Poland is obliged to ensure that abortion is legal, at a minimum, when a woman’s life or health is at risk, when the pregnancy involves a severe or fatal fetal impairment or when the pregnancy results from sexual assault.
Furthermore, by removing a pre-existing legal entitlement to accessing abortion, Poland acted contrary to the international law principle of non-retrogression, which prohibits states from taking steps that undermine, restrict or remove existing rights or entitlements. Moreover, the ruling prevents Poland from complying with the above-mentioned judgments from the European Court of Human Rights and, as such, further undermines respect for the rule of law.
The regressive legal change has exposed women’s health and lives to serious harm by forcing them to carry pregnancies to term against their will, by forcing them to travel to other European countries to obtain safe and legal abortion care or by forcing them to seek clandestine abortion care outside of the scope of the law in Poland.
The CT’s ruling has had fatal consequences. Women die as a result of this ruling and its chilling effect on doctors, who are afraid of activities that could be qualified as abortion. They wait too long to induce stillbirths. They procrastinate in removing a dead fetus in time, and they hesitate to remove an ectopic pregnancy.
Hear their names: Justyna died in December 2020. Izabela, Anna from Świdnica and Dominika died in 2021. Agnieszka and Marta both died in 2022.
The ruling has significantly decreased access to antenatal tests. We hear from women contacting FEDERA that the doctors don't refer for antenatal testing or don't provide sufficient explanation of the results. There are more children born with severe and fatal defects who die shortly after birth. There is almost no institutional support for families who decide to take care of an ill child.
FEDERA and other women's rights organizations organized to provide information on access to medical abortion, abortion abroad and in some narrow cases—