After Poland's rulers, in alliance with the Catholic Church, decided on a de facto ban on abortion, resistance is growing.
Even before this, abortion could only be obtained if the birth endangered the mother's health, if the pregnancy was the result of rape, or if the unborn child had severe deformities. The latter should be forbidden in the future. In addition, Polish law allows doctors to refuse an abortion on grounds of conscience, which is a further noticeable complication in this strongly Catholic country.
This legal reform is a further attack on the self-determination of women. It aims to make her even more aware of the role of the mother and her subordination to a conservative family image. More and more Poles are resisting this with mass demonstrations in Warsaw, Cracow, Wrocław and even small towns. 430,000 were on the streets during the national women's strike, and a thematically adapted version of Bella Ciao was sung. The further restriction of abortions was only the spark on the fuse. Many Poles are angry about the Catholic-conservative gender and family image that the ruling class has been promoting for decades. "Moja macica nie kaplica", a slogan of the demonstrators is: "My womb is not a chapel". As is the case everywhere in the world, the state is trying to suppress the protests under the pretext of a risk of infection with Covid19.
Such changes in the law in Poland or Russia, where domestic violence has recently been downgraded to a misdemeanor, demonstrate again that patriarchy is not first imported to Europe by migrants, as the right wing repeatedly asserts. The oppression of women is inscribed in bourgeois society, where the role of the mother and the reticence towards the needs of the man is declared to be the essence of being a woman. Against this, women must be organized in the struggle for socialism. In Poland, where anticommunism has inflicted severe wounds, such a movement is missing more than ever.
