Poland Is in Revolt Against Its New Abortion Ban

By Ewa Majewska, Jacobin

27 October 20

Last Friday, Poland's Constitutional Court banned almost all abortion, as part of a wider Catholic-conservative offensive against women's rights. But the ruling has already sparked strikes and blockades across Poland — and the working-class women least able to afford a clandestine abortion are leading the revolt.

he ban on abortion, introduced in 1993 by the Polish Parliament, and fixed as the law by the Constitutional Court in 1997, was one of the milestones of Poland’s transition from state communism to neoliberal capitalism.

The law established in 1997 allowed abortion in three situations: when the pregnancy resulted from rape, when the life or health of the woman was in grave danger, or when the fetus risked severe illness or death. Last Friday, a ruling of the Constitutional Court has made it illegal to terminate pregnancy also in this third situation.

Given that the majority of the legal abortions conducted in Poland were performed because of this third reason, the ruling means that there will be almost no abortions in Poland — officially, that is. Unofficially, according to one of the country’s main feminist organizations, the Federation for Women and Family Planning, some hundred thousand abortions are made in Poland annually.

Various organizations in Poland and abroad help Polish women to get abortion pills or otherwise terminate pregnancy. The current law does not punish women for terminating pregnancy — but, by imposing up to three years’ imprisonment for helping women to terminate a pregnancy, it endangers the doctors as well as the providers of pharmacological aid.

Last Friday’s decision was taken under Poland’s conservative Law and Justice (PiS) government. Yet every political option has managed to betray women already. There were the social democrats, who had the necessary majority in Parliament to change the drastic anti-abortion law in 2004, but chose not to do so, as they needed the church’s support for Poland’s accession to the European Union. Or take the liberals, who claim that that the law established in 1997 was a “compromise.”

Having kept Poland in a state of constant anxiety about abortion since at least 2016, the conservatives now decided to push it further, again using the Constitutional Court. Jaros?aw Kaczy?ski, the leader of the ruling PiS, said in 2016 that women should keep risky pregnancies and give birth no matter what, even if the fetus dies.

Paying the Price

As with all things, abortion also has its class dimension, basically dividing the Polish society into those who can afford it, and those who cannot. It obviously matters, whether you live in a metropolitan area or in regions, where all doctors refuse to terminate pregnancies because of their “conscience.”

One of the most popular feminist slogans today says: “We want doctors without conscience!” In recent years, the liberal narrative of “choice” has been replaced by that of “need”; this, not to deny women’s right to choose, but to emphasize that most women do not have a choice when it comes to abortion.

Regardless of whether you decide to do it in Poland or abroad, it costs between 50 and 100 percent of your monthly salary — depending on the city, the form it takes, and its general accessibility. Indeed, every newspaper in Poland advertises abortion — albeit under the name of “inducing menstruation” or “regulating the menstrual cycle.” Many doctors who refuse to carry out terminations in public hospitals, agree to perform abortions in private clinics. It is all a question of money — and connections.

In recent decades, “the state of exception” has generally been discussed as a way of expressing the exceptional condition of refugees and undocumented migrants — the fact of being outside of the law. Necropolitics, a term coined by Achille Mbembe, shows how the neoliberal, globalized biopolitics governs the contemporary world by carelessly allowing the exposure of entire groups and populations to death.

I believe that today women in Poland are such a group, exposed to the risk of death by those who claim to continue the Christian heritage in Polish state institutions and the Catholic church. The perpetuation of the neoliberal pact of conservative values and liberal market takes the form of the oppression of women, in the name of traditionalist values.

Resistance

But wherever there is control, there is always resistance. And Polish women contested, undermined, and struggled against the abortion ban since day one.

In 1997 approximately a million signatures were collected for a referendum on abortion. In April 2016, faced with the first efforts to further restrict access to abortion, 100,000 women immediately joined feminist groups created ad hoc online. Some 150,000 marched in different cities and towns in Poland in what soon became known as “the Black Protests,” leading to the Women’s Strike and eventually the International Women’s Strike.

This resistance is again apparent today. On Monday, October 26, some thirty cities and towns in Poland were blockaded by cars, bikes, and pedestrians in spontaneous protests in support of the rights of women. The day before that, farmers used their vehicles to block streets in several small towns to protest the newly established abortion ban.

Following the first demonstrations on Friday October 23 — the day of the ruling — protests have extended from big cities to small towns and villages around the country. A rough count suggests that protests took place at least in seventy locations in Poland, as well as in some twenty towns and cities abroad.

A general strike has been called for Wednesday, and many workplaces have already begun declaring their support for the women’s cause. A new and very popular element of the protest is for feminists to visit churches in order to advocate for the right to abortion and women’s rights. The activists enter churches, and standing there, hold banners and distribute leaflets. This usually happens peacefully, without violent clashes.

The current protests do seem to have a slightly different vibe than those held previously — now we are mad, not just unhappy, and the main slogan is a swear word, “wypierdala?!”, which can be translated as: “get the fuck out of here!”

If they did do so, the deeply unpleasant Kaczy?ski and his conservative colleagues might have some trouble finding anywhere else to go. But Poland’s feminists have more serious problems to deal with.

Trump Wrong as Always About the Virus

By Ronnie Dugger, Reader Supported News

27 October 20

or our American democracy we the people, the citizens of the United States, should after almost four years well know what Donald Trump has said and done as our president. Many, perhaps most of us, already realize he is our would-be dictator. We should have a good idea, too, what he will do to us and the rest of the world for the next four years if he is re-elected. To fans nearby chanting to him “Four More Years,” he has suggested they change that to “Twelve More Years.”

We learned from reporter Bob Woodward’s first book about Trump, “Fear,” that his purpose in running for president was to dominate us; that, as he said, “Real power is — I don’t even want to use the word — fear.” Woodward could have thrown in lying, too. The Washington Post has recorded since Trump’s first day as president what he has publicly said and tweeted to us, and the Post has professionally evaluated the truthfulness or falseness of all of that. A couple of months back, the paper announced that our president had then made 200,055 false or misleading statements to all of us watching, listening, or reading. More than 20,000 false and deceiving statements since January 20, 2017.

During 14 recent months, the Post tells us, the things Trump told all of us were falsehoods or misleadings an average of 23 times each day, about one an hour. By its latest count through August 27, announced a couple of days ago, the Post revealed that Trump’s daily average of falsehoods and misleadings had become 56, about two every hour.

This means, at the minimum, doesn’t it, that Donald Trump doesn’t respect us as individuals or as we the people. It means he’ll say anything to all of us, false or not, to get us to think and do what he wants and often tells us to. No one can remember this about him all the time, so we might try to keep in mind if we can that our country’s trusted, truth-telling Bernie Sanders repeatedly calls him “a pathological liar,” and every time known to me Trump just lets it pass.

A solid majority of us clearly know and agree that Trump has failed to help protect us from our worst health crisis in a century, the coronavirus Covid-19. We learned a couple of weeks ago from Woodward’s second book about Trump, “Rage,” that he was told January 28th this year that the virus in China coming at us was going to be “deadly stuff,” he saying at some point maybe five times deadlier than the flu. “This,” his national security adviser Robert O’Brien had told him, “will be the greatest national security threat you will face in your presidency.” His deputy national security adviser, Matt Pottinger, who was present, agreed, and added that he had been working the phones “calling doctors in China and Hong Kong” and reading Chinese social media, and he had been told the new virus was comparable to the Spanish flu plague of 1918, which killed about 50 million people, about 675,000 in our country.

Ten days later, Trump called Hubbard and told him that the day before he and the dictator of China, Xi Jinping, had “a great talk for a long time.... mostly about the virus.” Trump offered to help Xi on it, but, Hubbard said, he was rebuffed. Our president told the reporter that same day that the way the virus infects someone, “It goes through air. You don’t have to touch things.... you just breathe the air and that’s how it’s passed,” and it’s “more deadly than even your strenuous flus.” It was not until March 19, though, that Trump told Woodward that, as Hubbard writes, “his statements in the early weeks of the virus had been deliberately designed to not draw attention to it.” Trump is quoted, “I wanted to play it down. I still like playing it down, because I don’t want to create a panic.”

For all the time since, our president has prevented and himself failed to form a national federal campaign to reduce or stop the pandemic and our sicknesses and deaths from it. Since then, knowing that this is a nationwide killing pandemic, he has lied and lied to us again and again that it is not serious and it’ll go away soon. He has been accused and written against as having no empathy or not caring about the deaths and suffering, thinking about only himself. Nevertheless he’s still doing the same thing now, the election approaching, to try to change the subject and thus escape being blamed in substantial part for our so many dead, the terror, sickness, and permanent bodily damage that can persist in the survivors, the inescapable paralysis, complications, and danger in all our lives.

As of this week, more than 220,000 people have died in the United States from the coronavirus, more than in any other country in the world. Trump has sneered to argue that everything’s going real good because without him keeping some of the Chinese out of the U.S. because Wuhan was stricken, many many more of us would be dead from it now — millions more, he says. His deaths-increasing failure as our president is that he has consciously and admittedly both opposed and intentionally prevented us from having the terribly needed national federal leadership and campaign to medically, politically, congressionally, culturally, and with the now proved-out personal remedies, cooperatively attack and slow down the plague while keeping the economy going as best can also be done.

Trump has been trying to silence and discredit, now all but firing Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s leading specialist against this kind and variety of health crisis. Now, instead, Trump and Dr. Scott W. Atlas, his not technically qualified but pro-Trump new virus adviser, are even discussing and considering together the idea of letting the virus spread among us unopposed except for the most vulnerable minority of us. The main purpose would be thereby trying to drive us up from our present level of about-10%-of-all-of-us infected to 60 or 70% of us. At about that level, it is plausibly postulated, our infections would probably slow and maybe end. Many scientific-medical experts, some of whom call the project unethical, warn that this undertaking could add maybe half a million or possibly millions more of us to our U.S. dead.

This happening now, and because of reasons Trump has caused, his re-election likely would or will consequentially mean more deaths among us from this plague. The Democratic nominee to defeat him, Joseph Biden, says Trump has turned the nation into a battlefield and “Trump’s reckless and negligent leadership threatens to put more lives at risk.” A few days ago in Philadelphia, President Obama referred to “the degree of incompetence and misinformation, the number of people who might not have died if we’d done the basics.”

Even with eight and a half million of us infected in the United States and about 60,000 more of us catching it every day, and a day or two ago a new record set for our country with 82,600 new coronavirus cases in one day, Trump goes on saying that our country is rounding a corner on the virus, and so on. It’s rounding a corner, but in the wrong direction. He just actually said to the voters, “It’s going away.” The New York Times (which Trump hates because, like the Post, it seeks and prints the truth and when necessary corrects errors about it) reports this week that “a third surge of the coronavirus has firmly taken hold ... across nearly the entire country.” About 700 of us are dying from it each day, and this is expected to get worse as the fall and winter cause more of us to stay inside more, in warm but closed places, breathing each other.

Meanwhile — just to keep the world in mind — at the very least 40 million people on our earth are infected with the virus and about 1,100,000 of us have already died from it. Yet world health-stricken, the dictatorial and extremely nationalistic Trump has withdrawn us from the United Nations’ invaluable World Health Organization (and, not to stress, but not to ignore, from the whole world’s Paris climate-control treaty and the anti-nuclear war treaty we and four other nations made with Iran). Trump also has federally funded corporations to research competitively, including among other nations, for vaccines that will cure the virus, while lying and scheming that we could safely have had a working vaccine before the election, and now that we will very soon thereafter.

In my opinion what we need now (and there’s time for it if Biden wins and agreed) is another emergency world conference of all the nations to, however long it takes, together share the funding and planning and continue to research, produce, and share fairly internationally the vaccine or vaccines that will work and costlessly vaccinate all of us who’ll consent against the coronavirus and Covid-19, the rich, poor, black, white, whoever regardless of nation or color, European, African, Asian, American, and everywhere.

Voting for Trump in my opinion is voting to turn our country into a corrupt, racist, and terribly dangerous dictatorship. To still have and to strengthen and improve our democracy, let’s make Biden our President.

Ronnie Dugger is the founding editor of the Texas Observer and received the George Polk lifetime journalism award in 2011. In a 26,000-word essay in The New Yorker in 1988 he advanced the proposition and case that even our presidential elections can be invisibly and unprovably stolen when counting the votes in computers, which he believes is now substantially realized. He has written biographies of Presidents Johnson and Reagan, books about Hiroshima and universities, and many articles in The Nation, The Atlantic, Harper’s, The New York Times, and other periodicals. A number of his essays focused on Donald Trump have been published on Reader Supported News online since 2016 and he has work on nuclear weapons and war under way. This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.