Poland is one of the few remaining pro-life countries in Europe, despite ongoing international pressure and efforts from lawmakers to legalize abortion. Despite it all, Poland has held firm, keeping the lives of preborn children protected from abortion. But the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) is now accusing the country of violating human rights due to its pro-life laws.
CEDAW recently issued a report saying that women are “facing severe human rights violations” because they aren’t able to access abortion. “The situation in Poland constitutes gender-based violence against women and may rise to the level of torture or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment,” CEDAW Vice-Chair Genoveva Tisheva said in the press release. “Together, these factors create a complex, hostile and chilling environment in which access to safe abortion is stigmatised and practically impossible.”
The Committee concluded in its report that the current legislation, which prevents women from exercising their reproductive choice, forces them to carry pregnancies to term, endangers their health and life, or subjects them to hostile and burdensome procedures, resulting in mental and physical suffering that constitutes gender-based violence against women. It may also constitute torture or cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment, in violation of several articles of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women.
Tisheva further added, “Women’s mental anguish was exacerbated when forced to carry a non-viable foetus to term, a situation that has worsened since a 2020 Constitutional Court ruling banned abortion even in cases of fatal foetal abnormalities.”
Unsurprisingly, the official recommendation was for Poland to legalize abortion.
Poland’s abortion laws
In 2021, Poland put a law into place banning eugenic abortions. Before that, 98% of abortions in Poland were committed on preborn children with disabilities. The number of abortions committed plummeted almost immediately, from 1,076 in 2020 to just 107 in 2021. That number has since risen, to 425 in 2023, but it’s still much lower than before legalization.
“This means that the law is working and has allowed specific people to be saved,” lawyer and psychologist Magdalena Korzekwa-Kaliszuk, head of the pro-life Proelio Group Foundation, told the Catholic News Agency in 2022. “A good law has a positive impact on people’s attitudes. On the one hand, it reinforces the conviction that the right to life should not depend on the diagnosis of a medical condition. On the other hand, not being able to kill a child on eugenic grounds means that doctors will no longer have a basis for proposing or even pressuring parents to have an abortion.”
Lawmakers previously tried to legalize abortion through 12 weeks for any reason whatsoever, but the bill failed to pass. Andrzej Duda, the president of Poland, had signaled that he would not have signed the bill if it had passed, saying, “Abortion is murder. For me, it is simply the deprivation of life.”
Despite these attempts to legalize abortion, tens of thousands of people marched for life in Warsaw earlier this year.
Conflicting reports from Europe
The European Union (EU) has also been pressuring Poland to legalize abortion. In 2022, the EU voted to sanction Poland for violating EU laws. In 2021, the EU Parliament issued a resolution declaring abortion a “human right,” and even suggested that pro-life laws should be criminalized.
Yet the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) issued a surprising ruling, coming down in favor of Poland when a group of eight women sued the country, claiming its pro-life laws violated their human rights. The ECHR has previously singled out Poland in cases attacking its pro-life laws, and argued that censoring pro-life speech is “necessary.” Despite this, the ECHR ruled that the women’s case was inadmissible due to lack of evidence. Though this case had a positive result for Poland, there are still over 1,000 similar cases waiting to be heard, with many women claiming that having a child with a disability will cause them severe distress.
The United Nations’ pro-abortion agenda
The United Nations (UN) is not an unbiased organization when it comes to the issue of abortion. On the contrary, the UN highly values abortion, and has tried to make it legal and widely available across the globe. In response to the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization Supreme Court ruling, which overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, the UN issued a brief arguing that abortion is protected by international human rights law.
Pro-life countries are often pressured by the UN to legalize abortion, and it has referred to pro-life laws as “torture” and “extremist hate.” Pro-life workshops, meanwhile, have been deemed unwelcome at the UN because they are too “controversial.”
The United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) is also believed to have been complicit in aiding China’s One Child Policy, which led to widespread human rights abuses, including forced abortions. The UNFPA has continued to try to discourage population growth, particularly in Africa, where it regularly promotes abortion and birth control among its largely pro-life citizens, which has been referred to as “ideological colonization.”
Given how ardently the UN promotes abortion, it’s not altogether surprising that it would issue a report claiming that a nation with pro-life laws is violating “human rights.” The reality, however, is that the most basic of all human rights is the right to life – and abortion violates that right, every time it is committed. There can be no human right which involves the intentional taking of another human life, which is why abortion can never be a human right.
