HELSINKI They escaped from hell, they woke up in the Middle Ages. And now the phone of Krystyna Kacpura, lawyer and director of the “Association for Family and Women’s Planning” rings constantly. On the other end of the line, most of the time, the desperate voice of a woman who doesn’t know how to perform an abortion. For years, deadly abortion restrictions have forced Polish women to flee abroad or turn to mothers. Or, at best, to NGOs that offer whatever help they can. But in these dramatic weeks, the Ukrainians join the Poles.
Women fleeing an armed invasion. Raped by Russian soldiers. Traumatized by the bombs. And in complicated conditions, sometimes too complicated to continue pregnancy. But who find themselves in a different ditch, in a more subtle but no less painful war. And Krystyna Kacpura can do little.
Ukrainians were fleeing a country, Ukraine, which is now being bombed but allowed abortions up to 12 weeks before the Russian invasion. And they ended up in Poland, a stronghold of Radio Maria’s ultraCatholicism and the World Congress of Families. Human Rights Watch’s Hillary Margolis told Polish media that “Ukrainians are not used to our restrictions: there is a lot of fear and anxiety among them.”
Poland, Parliament rejects law criminalizing abortion
from our correspondent Tonia Mastrobuoni December 02, 2021
Two million Ukrainians fled to Poland, 90% of them are women and children. It is the country that welcomed them with the greatest enthusiasm, that changed the laws to favor their integration, traversed by a wave of moving solidarity that, even after a month and a half of war, does not seem to break. However, in the country ruled by Mateusz Morawiecki, abortion is possible in very few cases, even if the fetus is dead or deformed and the mother is risking her life. In December last year, a raid by the ruling Pis party to have abortion banned in cases of rape or incest failed. It would have been another humiliation for the Ukrainian refugees.
Anyone familiar with the police state that accompanies the Morawiecki government’s libertykilling laws is Justyna Wydrzynska, an activist with Abortion Without Borders, the first case of a European woman jailed for giving a woman victim of domestic violence the “pill.” afterwards” sent . One day this woman called her scared. She was less than three months pregnant. She did not want to continue the pregnancy: her partner was violent and abusive. “I felt for her, I know what domestic violence means,” she says. Wydrzynska sent her a pack of morningafter pills. They were intercepted by the violent comrade who called the police. The activist has since been on trial for illegal drug trafficking.
Poland, new breach of law: A law establishing the super prosecutor against abortion, divorce and LGBTQ+
by our correspondent Tonia Mastrobuoni November 30, 2021
“Since March 1, 99 Ukrainians have contacted me and asked how to have an abortion or how to get the morningafter pill,” says the activist. As Russian troops were pushed back from the outskirts of Kyiv and mass graves, massacres and systematic ethnic rape ensued, Wydrzynska learned news that chilled her: “Volunteers who went to Bucha said that the women raped there are scared to come to Poland. They know our laws and fear them. Rather, they are trying to find their way in a country still devastated by war.” A neverending ordeal © RIPRO