What Poland Tells America About Abortion Politics

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

It happened like this: A dogged religious right and a determined set of anti-abortion movers and shakers poured years of work into curbing abortion access. Their efforts swayed conservative politicians, who adopted opposition to abortion as a central ideological goal in a vicious culture war. They appointed conservative judges to the courts, and when the topic of abortion crossed those judges’ dockets, they made a shocking yet predictable ruling that vastly curtailed abortion access.

No, I’m not talking about the U.S. This is what happened in Poland

-snip-

Under communist rule in the ’60s and ’70s, abortion was readily available. But after the Soviet Union’s fall, lobbying by the Catholic Church led to a 1993 law restricting abortion to cases of rape, incest, fetal abnormality and threat to the mother’s health. Support for legal abortion spiked in 1993 before dipping through the rest of the decade, suggesting Poles quickly became accustomed to a new — stricter — status quo.

In the U.S., Republican-controlled states rolled back abortion access with laws that sidestepped Roe — mandating ultrasounds and waiting periods, forcing some clinics to widen their hallways and abortion providers to obtain admitting privileges at local hospitals to keep their doors open. Meanwhile, Poland's Law and Justice Party (or PiS, for Prawo i Sprawiedliwość would take a more direct route. In 2016, they endorsed a harsher ban on abortion, prohibiting the procedure even in cases of rape, incest and of fetal abnormality — the latter of which accounted for 98 percent of abortions in the country after the 1993 law — but preserving the exception for cases posing danger to the mother’s life. The move triggered a national wave of demonstrations, dubbed the “Black Protest.” One hundred-thousand Poles — wearing dark clothing and holding black flags and umbrellas — thronged in city streets.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/poland-tells-america-abortion-politics-171740286.html

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

1. Romania under Communism likewise banned

abortions. And I think most or all forms of birth control. The result? Thousands of abandoned babies who were consigned to miserable, inadequate orphanages.