Polish Women Still Wait in Line--for Their Rights : Solidarity: Even though the Polish Parliament rejected a tough new abortion law, the new regime seems to have little place for women.

While Polish men are in raptures over freedom, Polish women sigh with a heavy heart.

“Solidarity has become the realm of men, although women account for 40% of the union membership,” says Barbara Blasinska from the trade union’s women’s section. “Every voice on our part encounters disfavor and total disregard. Maybe we should blame it on the ideological confusions, where questions of women’s equal rights are traced back to the communist ideology.”

Women are absent from political parties and from the Solidarity power structures. There is not a single woman in the government. “Polish men are slaves to their mental habits,” adds Danuta Sowa of the State Bureau for Women. “They relegate the woman to the kitchen, where she would fit best with a baby in her lap. It is the men who wield power, and they don’t want to share it.”

Throughout the years of the struggle against communism, the Polish women staunchly stood by their men. They helped publish and distribute illegal bulletins, or bibula, and they provided shelter, comfort and uplift. Without a word of complaint, they queued up for many hours to get food for their families. Indeed, the image of the Polish woman projected for those many years was a dumpy, dishevelled woman with shopping bags. All the women wished for was to feed and coddle their husbands and children. In return, they were neither adored nor pampered, but they felt needed.

The shops have stocked up with goods, and the marathon queuing is a thing of the past. It would seem that the woman has finally regained her dignity.

Wrong. “Men say the women have hearts but no brains,” says Danuta Nepalska of the Confederation of Polish Women. “They go out of their way to argue that the household is the woman’s sole destiny.”

When I returned to Poland from a few months’ visit in the United States, I was bewildered to hear the leader of the Party of Real Politics, Janusz Korwin-Mikke, vociferate about stripping women of the vote. In many debates in the press, radio and television, I heard people accuse women of egoism, hedonism, neglect of maternal duties, false ambitions.

And it’s not just the men saying it. In one debate, Ewa Kazimierska, a genetics professor, asked whether “in emphasizing the woman’s right to self-realization, pleasure and comfort, we do not prejudice the children’s right to normal development?” During a Polish Youth Pastoral Conference, many people stated that women should go back to their “natural functions.” What’s more, they said that relegating women to the kitchen and the bedroom would be the panacea for Poland’s economic troubles.

Women are the first to fall victim to unemployment. “The widespread belief is that women simply are no good for many jobs and they should not apply for them,” says Solidarity’s Blasinska. In general, a man of any trade in Poland enjoys more prestige and confidence than a woman. Poles, for example, prefer to be treated by a male rather than a female doctor. Why? Men supposedly have a greater sense of responsibility, better credentials and more composure.

But the harshest retribution of all against women may yet come in the area of reproductive rights. Abortion is cursed. Although the Polish Sejm, our Parliament, just rejected a law that would have banned abortions--and handed the Catholic Church a major political setback--it passed a resolution calling on the government to ban abortions by private doctors.

The debate leading up to the parliamentary vote was disturbing. The bill in question would have outlawed abortion even in cases of pregnancies resulting from rape or incest and would have imposed jail terms on any doctors who performed abortions. Some Sejm deputies were convinced that the woman should also be liable for punishment. As one of them, Jan Rokita, put it during a Sejm meeting, “The women are not wind-fertilized and should be held accountable for their conduct.”

Women outside the government often hold a different view. “I regard the abortion ban as a violation of the freedom of self-determination, interference with the most intimate life of not just the woman, but man” also, says Elzbieta Gaweda, the president of the Women’s Dignity Assn. “It is an assault on equal rights launched by the (Catholic) Church and Christian parties.”

Gaweda considers the proposed abortion ban as only the first step toward the all-out interdiction of women. She thinks there could be more problems. “I have already heard some people descended from Catholic circles say that women should not be allowed to earn educational degrees at all, because those who are educated too well pose excessive demands and represent kind of lost causes for the family.”

In Polish towns, every 10th pregnancy is terminated by abortion. A majority of Polish married couples do not use contraceptives, so abortion is the main form of birth control. To the question why they don’t use contraceptives, 33% of women respond that they fear side effects, 15% say they don’t know much about it and 33% say they have religious reasons. As a result, about 500,000 pregnancies are aborted in Poland every year; some estimates even double that figure.

Under the circumstances, priests sound calls for abandoning all contraceptive ways. Church-organized “patrols,” usually made up of three members, haunt pharmacies to warn their owners against the sale of contraceptives. They threaten that if a pharmacist fails to obey, his name shall be condemned from the pulpit. Particularly eager patrol members even go as far as buying out all the condoms in stock in a given pharmacy.

Women who want to terminate their pregnancies feel the pressure. So do gynecologists. Last year, the zealous health minister issued an ordinance saying that doctors and nurses have the right to refuse to assist at abortions. The ordinance itself amounts to a violation of law while the act allowing abortions remains in effect.

In the textile town of Lodz, three women who attempted to perform abortions by themselves because they were ashamed of seeing a doctor died of complications. They orphaned 12 children in all. Dr. Waclaw Dec from Lodz admitted that the administrative authorities attempted to persuade him to report false causes of their deaths.

Women are “treated as delivery gadgets,” says Anna Starzynska of one of Poland’s women’s associations. She had feared that the abortion bill would be enacted “as a gift for the Pope, who will be visiting Poland this coming June.” The Pope doubtless will comment on the parliamentary action, and women will watch the reaction.

To ameliorate the destinies of Polish women, the government resolved to appoint a minister for women. Ten women, including a senator, a Sejm deputy, a sociologist and an ombudsman--all respected--were running for the post. But the decision on the appointment was preceded by long consultations with the church hierarchy, which wanted the position to be filled by a married Catholic woman, mother of more than one.

Is there a connection in Poland between the number of children a woman has and her intelligence quotient? It makes one shudder to realize that such questions come to mind in Poland, in Europe, toward the end of the 20th Century.