Abortion; influencing politics
M.M. Lech
Fertility and Sterility Research Center, Warsaw, Poland
Abortion is a response to unwanted pregnancy, and is a consequence of poor
sexual education and poor (or unavailable) family planning services. As it is
well known, yearly number of abortion all over the world, approach the number of
50 million. 40% of them are illegal and unsafe. Everyday more than 200 women die
due to unsafe/illegal abortions. Legalisations of abortions make these
procedures safes, save women’s lives and diminish indicators of maternal
mortality. Restrictive abortion laws means; illegal abortions, creation of
abortion-underground, high number of unsafe abortions, woman’s mortality and
morbidity, criminalization of the society, and even infanticide.
Abortion law is the most influent factor of availability and accessibility of
abortions in Europe. Abortion laws in Europe vary from the complete prohibition,
in Malta, and availability of abortion only in case of endangered (by pregnancy)
life of the women, in Ireland and Poland, to ‘‘abortion on request’’ in
most of the European countries.
In reality, restrictive abortion law in the certain country does not mean
‘‘abortion-free-country’’. For example, official data on number of
abortions in Poland is less than 200 per year (means 0.022 per thousand women in
the age of 15–49), but in reality, estimated numbers of abortion exceed 50
thousand abortions per year. Restrictive abortion law in Poland means also
‘‘safe abortion services availability for well-off women only’’. The
fight for the contemporary and democratic abortion law (similar to abortion laws
in most of the European countries) is one of the very hot points of politics in
Poland. Some of groups of society, woman’s right lobby, NGO’s and some of
the health professionals are trying to influence politics by; raising awareness,
monitoring and initiating activities concerning reproductive health/rights and
women’s rights in the community, initiating media campaigns (through reports,
press conferences, fact sheets, press releases, NGO’s bulletins, open letters
etc) on legalization of abortion and introducing sex education at schools,
advocating for implementation of the commitments made by the Government during
the international conferences (Cairo Conference on Population and Development,
Beijing Fourth World Conference on Women), formation of various national and
international networks and coalitions (including the Polish Committee of NGO’s-
Beijing ’95), promoting international standards concerning human rights in the
area of women’s reproductive health and rights.
