Pro-life laws in Poland are saving unborn babies’ lives.
A new report from the Polish Ministry of Health shows a 90-percent drop in abortions in 2021 after the country’s Constitutional Court struck down an exception that allowed unborn babies with disabilities to be aborted, the Catholic News Agency reports.
Now, the European country protects unborn babies by banning abortions except in cases of rape, incest or threats to the mother’s life.
According to the new data, there were 107 abortions in 2021 in the country, a 90-percent decrease from the 1,076 in 2020.
Pro-life leaders celebrated the news, saying babies are being saved from violent abortion deaths all across Poland. CNA reports more:
If it had not been for the change in the law about 1,000 children would have lost their lives in their mothers’ wombs in Poland, mainly due to suspected Down syndrome, said lawyer and psychologist Magdalena Korzekwa-Kaliszuk, head of the pro-life Proelio Group Foundation.
“This means that the law is working and has allowed specific people to be saved,” she said.
Abortion activists contend that women just are getting illegal abortions instead, but Korzekwa-Kaliszuk said pro-life laws change hearts as well as save lives.
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“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,” she told CNA. “ … 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.”
Researchers also have found that pro-life laws stop abortions and save lives.
“… recent studies show that the majority of women who are prevented from reaching an abortion provider due to travel distance give birth as a result,” a group of economists and researchers told the United States Supreme Court in a brief last year.
Similarly, Diana Green Foster, a widely known abortion activist and researcher at the University of California San Francisco, wrote at Rewire in 2019: “Stop saying that making abortion illegal won’t stop people from having them. … [O]nly 48 percent of unintended pregnancies are aborted in countries where abortion is illegal compared to 69 percent where it is legal indicates that many women have to carry unwanted pregnancies to term.”
Poland is one of the few European countries that protects unborn babies from abortions in almost all circumstances. In October 2020, its Constitutional Court struck down an exception in its 1993 abortion law that allowed abortions on unborn babies with disabilities. The justices ruled that the exception violates the constitution because it discriminates against human beings with disabilities.
Poland still allows abortions in cases of rape, incest or threats to the mother’s life.
A “silent majority” of the largely Catholic country supports wide-spread protections for unborn babies, according to a recent AFP report. Evidence of this can be seen in polls and recent elections where voters repeatedly have elected strong pro-life majorities to parliament.
Recent polls of Polish voters indicate that the “devout Catholic country is far from turning pro-choice,” the report continued. These include a 2020 poll by Kantar that found 62 percent believe abortion should be legal only in limited cases and 11 percent believe it should be completely illegal. Another poll by Estymator found that 67 percent support the existing law, while only 19 percent want the country to expand abortions.
