Until restrictive abortion laws change, women will continue to suffer

The past weeks have seen a number of tragic events surrounding abortion in Europe. In Poland, yet another pregnant woman has died of sepsis having been denied a life-saving termination1; in Britain, a woman was sentenced to 28 months in prison for taking abortion pills beyond the gestational age limit.2In Poland, abortion laws were relatively liberal during Communism. When democracy was restored in the 1990s, a new, restrictive law was imposed allowing abortion in three narrowly defined cases: when pregnancy carried a risk to the life or health of the mother; when it was a result of a crime; or in the case of severe fetal anomaly. This last condition, accounting for the overwhelming majority of the few abortions carried out by the Polish health system (97% of the total 1,110 in 2019),3 was ruled to be unconstitutional by Poland’s Supreme Court in 2020. This caused a 10-fold drop in…
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