WARSAW (Reuters) – When Polish doctors told Paulina, 29, that her unborn child had no kidneys and would die at birth, she knew she could not continue the pregnancy.
“Everyone says the reward after the birth pain is to have your child in your hands,” said Paulina, a Gdynia sales manager, who asked Reuters to withhold her last name.
“She is OK. It would give birth to a dead child, and that pain would be a thousand times worse.
Until two months ago, women like Paulina still had the chance to allow abortion in Poland. However, in a ruling that came into force in January, the constitutional court ruled that stopping the termination of pregnancy due to fetal abnormalities imposed a virtually total ban on abortions.
Polish law now considers only incest, rape or a threat to the life and health of a mother as valid reasons to terminate a pregnancy.
Poland’s ruling nationalists supported the move, but the country was shaken by weeks of nationwide protests following the October 22 ruling, which quickly turned into an outpouring of anger against the nationalist government of Law and Justice (PiS) and the powerful Catholic Church.
Paulina’s only option, therefore, was to find a doctor willing to testify that giving birth was a threat to her health.
Two weeks after Paulina found out about her baby’s condition, abortion rights activists helped her find a psychiatrist prepared to say she needed an abortion for mental health reasons and her abortion continued.
This makes her one of ten women who have managed to have an abortion for these reasons since the ruling came into force, abortion support groups told Reuters.
Several Reuters doctors and lawyers have spoken out that mental health abortions are in line with the law, but government officials and conservative groups are questioning it.
The Polish Ministry of Health told Reuters in an email statement that a qualified medical specialist in the right field should determine whether a pregnancy threatens the life or health of the mother, depending on the woman’s illness.
He did not say whether he considered a threat to mental health to be sufficient grounds for abortion.
“I have seen opinions like,‘ I am anxious and do not want to give birth, ’” said Michal Wojcik, government minister and member of the socially conservative grouping United Poland allied with existing law and justice (PiS). party, he told Reuters.
“I don’t think we need to count these kinds of instances, which exist simply to circumvent the rules.”
A lawyer for Ordo Iuris, a campaign group advocating for ultra-conservative and religious causes, also told Reuters that in his view, giving recommendations on the basis of mental health was illegal.
ABORTION ACCESS CONTRACT
Some women have opted to have an abortion abroad, despite the coronavirus pandemic and the associated travel restrictions. Paulina was initially told she had to go to the Netherlands, a trip she was afraid to do alone.
According to abortion support groups, several women are hoping to find a doctor who is willing to help them, of whom there are still very few. This is partly out of fear: under Polish law, women who suffer an illegal abortion receive no punishment, while a doctor can be imprisoned for up to three years.
In addition, many doctors in Poland, especially in the more conservative southeast, were already exercising their legal right to refuse for religious reasons to terminate pregnancies before the ruling came into force. They are expected to do more now.
Of the four doctors who agreed to support Paulina’s case for an abortion, only one, Aleksandra Krasowska, a psychiatrist based in Warsaw, was willing to be appointed by Reuters and confirmed that she had referred Paulina for termination due to her deterioration of mental health. . The other three, a psychiatrist, a doctor and a gynecologist, spoke to Reuters anonymously.
“It’s important that this is not a one-man decision … Then it’s easier for all of us to control this fear of the prosecutor and the three years in prison,” one of the psychiatrists involved told Reuters.
Maciej Socha, a Gdansk-based gynecologist, is one of the few doctors willing to publicly argue that a threat to a woman’s mental health should be accepted as the reason for the abortion.
“If a patient has a brain tumor and continuing the pregnancy endangers their life and health, we can end the pregnancy. If a patient has psychiatric reasons … in my opinion, this is enough to end such a pregnancy, ”said Socha.
Paulina believes that the doctors who helped her terminate her pregnancy saved her life. “These people are heroes. They are not afraid of the consequences of this sick country they live in, ”he said.
Additional reports by Alicia Ptak and Anna Wlodarczak-Semczuk; Edited by Raissa Kasolowsky