Abortion restrictions push women and girls to unsafe procedures. UN experts: Abortion restrictions in Poland violate women’s rights Human Rights
Women in Poland face serious violations of their rights due to restrictive abortion laws. Many are forced to carry unwanted pregnancies, risk their lives by going to underground clinics or traveling abroad to terminate pregnancies, UN human rights activists said after studying the situation in Poland.
According to a study conducted by the UN Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women, restrictions imposed by the Polish government have already resulted in several preventable deaths.
Criminalization of abortion
Members of the Committee believe that the criminalization of assistance to women in obtaining abortions, combined with minimal legal exceptions and the frequent practical inaccessibility of services, results in the denial of safe and legal abortion to the majority of women in Poland who wish to terminate a pregnancy.
“The situation in Poland constitutes gender-based violence against women and may amount to torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment,” said the Committee’s Vice-Chair Genoveva Tisheva.
Conducting the investigation
Tisheva visited Poland in 2022, together with her former Committee colleague Lia Nadaria, to conduct a confidential investigation into allegations by civil society organizations that women in Poland were facing serious and systematic violations of their rights. The Committee received the full cooperation of the Polish government throughout its work.
The report’s authors concluded that Poland’s already restrictive legal framework, which allows legal abortion only in cases where a woman’s life or health is at risk or where the pregnancy is the result of a crime, is further undermined by serious shortcomings in its implementation. For example, fearing criminal liability often makes doctors hesitant to perform abortions even when they are legal. Such a procedure is often postponed until the woman’s life is not in immediate danger.
In addition, many doctors refuse to perform abortions on moral or religious grounds, making it even more difficult for women to access such services.
Bureaucracy
The Committee members note that access to abortion in cases of pregnancies resulting from crime is seriously hampered by a “complex and victim-unfriendly bureaucratic process,” which is further aggravated by the efforts of major anti-abortion lobby groups and threats and denunciations against those who assist women seeking abortions.
“Hostile Environment” and stigmatization
“Taken together, these factors create a difficult, hostile environment and a climate of fear in which access to safe abortion is stigmatized and virtually impossible,” said Tisheva.
The authors of the report warn that denial of abortion is a form of discrimination against women, and provide recommendations to the Polish government aimed at correcting the current situation.