While the Polish government buys time, demonstrators are organizing. Warsaw and other Polish cities rallied this week against Poland’s latest abortion bill, which aims to outlaw all voluntary abortions, even in the case of fetus malformations. The bill will be reviewed by the Family Committee and the Social Affairs Committee in the second week of April.
On March 14, a press release by the Polish Church had pushed MPs in the Sejm, Poland’s lower chamber, to speed up parliamentary works and secretly approve a controversial law presented by pro-life think tank “Zycie i Rodzina Kai Godek.”
It was a kind of Easter break after a week of demonstrations that ended with a “Black Friday,” during which, according to organizers, at least 90,000 citizens rallied to say “nie” to the bill. But the government doesn’t seem willing to backtrack on the bill, which Jaroslaw Kaczynski, leader of the populist right Law and Justice party (Prawo i Sprawiedliwość, PiS), allegedly really likes. “Under no circumstance is our party prepared to give up on the abortion ban in case of ‘illnesses of the fetus,’” he repeated.