33 Years After Legalizing Abortion, Poland Is Pressured to Reconsider

Abortion has been legal under Communist rule for 33 years in predominantly Roman Catholic Poland, but now with conditions relaxed and open elections ahead there’s talk of outlawing it.

At a recent meeting of Solidarity union activists preparing for the elections, nominees were challenged on their positions on abortion.

In a television special, a member of Parliament suggests the possibility of a nationwide referendum on the law that has made abortions legal since 1956.

A proposal submitted by 78 of the 460 members of the Sejm, as Parliament is called, would ban abortions altogether. It provides for three-year jail terms for women who have them and the doctors who perform them.

Catholic Church loyalists within the government alliance support the ban, but it is opposed by the Communist Party leadership. There are strongly religious strains against abortion within the Solidarity-led opposition movement, while others in the movement defend abortion as a personal matter.

Abortion was legalized in Poland as part of a Communist economic and social policy unfettered by religious considerations or public debate.

Poland now has one of the world’s highest rates of abortion, with some estimates suggesting that more than half of all pregnancies are terminated.

The most recent statistics available record 605,500 births and 122,500 abortions in 1987, but the abortion figure does not count the vast numbers performed in privatedoctors’ offices. One demographic study puts the total at 600,000 abortions a year and church attacks on abortion have estimated 800,000 to 1 million procedures annually.

Since the abortion bill was submitted in the Sejm on Feb. 28, the official press and television have carried lengthy discourses on abortion and hundreds of abortion foes attended a Catholic Mass and protest march, while opponents of the ban circulated petitions.

The recent negotiations between Solidarity and the government only touched on abortion, partly because of the divided opinion within the union.

Dr. Zofia Kuratowska, who leads the Solidarity side on health issues, considers the proposed ban “very repressive” but says that within the movement, “people who are very strongly with the Catholic Church are not so strongly against (the ban) as I am.”

Two Solidarity activists who are election candidates awkwardly played both sides of the issue during a recent meeting--opposing the proposed law because of its stiff jail terms while agreeing that abortion is wrong.

The church is organizing anti-abortion drives in parishes and outlining its opposition.

“The law legalizing abortion is the work of (a) totalitarian ruling of the Stalinist type, which has common ideological roots with Nazism,” said the Rev. Jerzy Bajda, an anti-abortion leader.

“Looking at the (1956) law from today’s perspective, one should say its aim could only be the moral and biological destruction of the Polish nation.”

Jan Dobraczynski, a Catholic Sejm deputy and head of the national patriotic group PRON, voted against the abortion law in 1956 while one of the five non-party Sejm members. He is a leader in the fight now.

“From the moment the new law was in force . . . it quickly became more dangerous than it looked in theory,” he said. “The law allowed abortion but set many social and economic conditions. Soon, it gave doctors the freedom to do it without any justifications.”

Opponents of the ban say that forbidding abortion after 33 years would drive it underground, making it less safe and more costly.

“This proposed law is dangerous because we may return to the secrecy of abortions,” said Jan Mlynarski, a Warsaw hospital physician. “Some doctors will be making fortunes on it, but women will only suffer.”

Mlynarski added that most women seeking abortions give him economic reasons: “Women are afraid of what might happen with their second or third child.”

The impact of unplanned pregnancy takes on special poignancy because couples often are hard pressed to support children with whom they may be sharing two tiny rooms.

The wait for an apartment is a decade or more for young couples. The housing crisis and poor economic conditions have a deep impact on decisions to have children.

Married women in Poland work out of economic necessity, if not professional reward, but child and essential family care remains their responsibility.

Banning abortion would “accelerate the pauperization of millions of women who are already the most burdened part of our society,” a group of intellectuals wrote in a women’s magazine.

The government-backed Polish Women’s League has also spoken out.

“We oppose the assumption included in the draft (law) that the woman is to bear all legal responsibility for abortion, which contradicts the legal acts that provide for women’s and men’s equality in rights and duties,” league secretary Elzbieta Dehnel-Luszczynska told the state news agency PAP.

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