Plan to Relax Abortion Law Inflames Poles

Maria Wilk has lived through turbulent times in Poland over the last two decades, but the demonstration outside All Saints Roman Catholic Church here Wednesday was the first to draw her into the streets.

“I had to come for my own conscience, and I had to come for the sake of my children,” said the mother of four, kneeling on the cold pavement in prayer. “I’ve always considered the commandment ‘Thou shall not kill’ something that cannot be interpreted in any other way.”

Wilk was among the tens of thousands of Poles who came to the capital Wednesday to protest parliamentary plans to liberalize the country’s 3-year-old abortion law, the most restrictive among former East Bloc countries and second in all of Europe only to Ireland in its stringency.

The Polish Parliament is expected to vote on the proposed amendments today, and Wednesday’s demonstration was the latest in a series of highly charged protests that have attracted hundreds of thousands of ordinary Poles over the last two months.

As in the United States, the crux of the abortion dispute is about competing claims over a woman’s right to choose.

But in Poland, the debate has also become a lightning rod for one of the country’s major unresolved issues since the end of communism: How Roman Catholic do Poles want their country to be?

“The time has come for Catholics in Poland to rethink their attitudes,” said Wilk, 38, who deemed the rally Wednesday so important that she pulled three of her children out of school and brought her toddler along as well. “I want my children to see a different Poland.”

Since the fall of communism seven years ago, abortion has been among the hottest, most divisive issues in Poland, where more than 90% of the people are nominally Catholic and most regularly attend Sunday Mass.

Passage of the current law--which permits abortions only in rare cases such as rape, incest and danger to the life of the mother--was a key achievement of the Solidarity governments that ruled until 1993, reversing a Communist-era law that made abortions freely available.

But the debate has taken on unprecedented virulence and urgency since the election last year of President Aleksander Kwasniewski, a former Communist who has had a rocky relationship with church officials. Unlike Lech Walesa, his devout Catholic predecessor, Kwasniewski has made it clear that he will not veto abortion rights legislation or oppose secularization of Polish laws, including a new constitution that some want to be free of any reference to a supreme being.

“The current law has caused much social harm and human suffering,” said Izabella Sierakowska, a Kwasniewski ally speaking Wednesday in Parliament. “We cannot pretend that there is no problem, no abortion ‘tourism’ [to neighboring countries] or underground, that there are no abandoned infants.”

The bill would allow pregnancies to be terminated by women “who find themselves in difficult living conditions or where they have other important personal reasons,” but only after they underwent counseling and waited three days to reconsider. It would also step up sex education in schools and lower the price of contraceptives.

As a testament to the groundswell of anti-abortion opposition, a vote that a few weeks ago was expected to be a sure victory for abortion rights supporters is now considered a close call, even though public opinion polls have consistently shown a majority of Poles favor liberalizing the law.

Abortion rights activists have tried to respond with counterdemonstrations, but there is no tradition for such activism and many women are still reluctant to publicly defy the church.

“There is very strong pressure. One can feel it everywhere,” said legislator Izabela Jaruga-Nowacka, author of the proposed changes.

The world’s most famous and influential Pole, Pope John Paul II, has even weighed in on the debate, twice appealing to his fellow countrymen to reject the changes.

In a message read to 100,000 pilgrims gathered last month in Czestochowa, the holiest of Polish shrines, the pontiff said he was filled with pain at the prospect of “defenseless human beings” denied the right to life in his homeland.

“A nation that kills its own children is a nation without hope,” he said to a Polish audience in Rome, his voice trembling with emotion. “God forbid! God forbid!”

The abortion question, and the larger issue of church-state relations, comes against a historical backdrop in which the Catholic Church, more than any other institution, nurtured the Solidarity mass movement that eventually toppled communism.

But democracy can be fickle: Once free of totalitarianism, many Poles turned their backs on the church, which has been struggling to regain its footing ever since. Even the pope doesn’t enjoy the popularity he once commanded.

At the same time, voters also turned away from Solidarity, electing a governing coalition of former Communists and their allies in 1993.

Last year, they tossed out Walesa, the personification of the once-invincible alliance of anti-Communists and clerics.

The defeats were taken to heart, and, over the last few months, Solidarity trade union leader Marian Krzaklewski has begun building a coalition of pro-Catholic right-wing groups in advance of next year’s parliamentary elections. The Solidarity Election Action, as the alliance is called, has been a remarkable success with the electorate and has recently scored slightly ahead of the former Communists in public opinion polls.

The two-punch team of Solidarity and the Catholic Church is the main reason the liberalized abortion legislation is not already law. The proposed changes easily passed the lower house of Parliament in August. But when the bill went before the Senate, so many senators got cold feet that it failed to muster enough votes.

In voting today, the lower house can override the Senate with a majority of those members present. Yet, despite the lopsided 208-61 tally in August, the balloting is expected to be close because Krzaklewski has threatened to exclude from his alliance any party that supports the bill. With an army of anti-abortion activists ready to take to the streets, the threat is being taken seriously.