Krakow (Poland), March 7 (EFE). – The Polish Parliament will debate this Tuesday a bill that would ban the public defense of abortion, an initiative promoted by the ultra-conservative foundation “Life and Family”.
The Polish government party, Law and Justice, announced that it would not support this proposal and advocated a change in the parliamentary calendar so that the debate takes place this Tuesday, instead of tomorrow, March 8, International Women’s Day.
The text was presented by Kaja Godek, leader of “Life and Family” and political activist linked to the ultra-nationalist Confederation Party and the ultra-Catholic foundation “Ordo Iuris”, and was one of the leaders of the last amendment to the Polish law on abortion which criminalizes this practice in almost all cases.
In December 2022, the Godek Foundation announced what it called a “civic project” dubbed “abortion is murder” that seeks to criminalize the dissemination of information facilitating abortion, publicly support it, and even suggest that a woman voluntarily terminate her pregnancy.
Acts such as placing posters or stickers with information telephone numbers or mentioning the existence of organizations facilitating access to abortion are punishable by three years in prison, and five in the event that “a woman managed to convince her to abort while the child has already reached the capacity to live independently outside the mother’s body”.
In an interview published in Polish media, Kaja Godek said that “today we have a relatively good law, although imperfect, because it has a big gray area that allows killing children”.
For her part, Barbara Nowacka, deputy of the Polish opposition party Civic Platform, assured that the bill “is absurd, incompatible with European laws and judgments of European courts, restricts the right to information and violates the freedom of expression”.
Law and Justice spokesman Rafal Bochenek stressed that in his opinion “now is not the time to deal with issues that generate unnecessary emotions and social divisions. We have a war abroad, many challenges in international politics and the national economy, and that’s what we’re focusing on right now.”
In 2020 and 2021, massive protests took place across Poland against a Constitutional Court ruling that removed almost all legal grounds for abortion and provided prison sentences for those who perform abortions, even when it There is a high probability of serious and irreversible loss of the fetus, whether the fetus is born with a serious or terminal illness.
Since then, there have been cases of mothers dying in Polish hospitals, after doctors excessively delayed the abortion operation for fear of legal consequences. EFE
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