HELSINKI – They ran away from hell, they woke up in the Middle Ages. And now the phone of Krystyna Kacpura, lawyer and director of the “Federation for Planning for Families and Women” rings non-stop. On the other end of the line, most of the time, the desperate voice of a woman who doesn’t know how to have an abortion. For years, because of the deadly anti-abortion restrictions, the Polish women have been forced to flee abroad or to resort to mothers. Or, at best, to NGOs that offer all the help they can. But, in these dramatic weeks, the Ukrainians are joining the Poles.
Women fleeing an armed invasion. Raped by Russian soldiers. Traumatized by the bombs. And in complicated conditions, sometimes too complicated, to carry on a pregnancy. But who find themselves in another trench, in a more subtle but no less painful war. And Krystyna Kacpura can do little.
The Ukrainians fled a country, Ukraine, which is now under bombs but which, before the Russian invasion, allowed abortions up to the twelfth week. And they landed in Poland, a stronghold of ultra-Catholicism from Radio Maria and the World Congress of Families. Hillary Margolis, of Human Rights Watch, told the Polish media that “Ukrainians are not used to our restrictions: there is a lot of fear and anxiety among them”.
Poland, Parliament rejects the law that criminalizes abortion
by our correspondent Tonia Mastrobuoni
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Two million Ukrainians have taken refuge in Poland, 90% of them are women and children. It is the country that has welcomed them with the greatest enthusiasm, that has changed the laws to favor their integration, crossed by a wave of moving solidarity that does not seem to be broken even after a month and a half of war. However, in the country governed by Mateusz Morawiecki, abortion can be done in very few cases, even if the fetus is dead or malformed and the mother risks her life. In December of last year, a raid by the ruling party, Pis, to have abortion banned even in the case of rape or incest, had failed. For the Ukrainian refugees it would have been a further humiliation.
Who knows the police state that accompanies the Morawiecki government’s freedom-killing laws is Justyna Wydrzynska, activist of “Abortion Without Borders”, the first case of a European who ended up in prison for sending morning-after pills to a woman victim of domestic violence. One day that woman called her, terrified. She had been pregnant for less than three months. He did not want to carry on with her pregnancy: her partner was violent and abused her. “I empathized with her, I know what domestic violence means,” she says. Wydrzynska sent her a pack of morning-after pills. They were intercepted by the violent comrade who called the police. The activist has since been on trial for illegal drug trafficking.
Poland, new tear on rights: a law to establish the super-prosecutor against abortion, divorce and LGBTQ +
by our correspondent Tonia Mastrobuoni
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“Ninety-nine Ukrainians have already contacted me since March 1 asking how to have an abortion or how to get a morning-after pill,” says the activist. When the Russian troops were driven back from the outskirts of Kiev and mass graves, massacres and systematic, ethnic rapes emerged, Wydrzynska learned news that froze her: “Volunteers who went to Bucha said that the women raped there are afraid to come to Poland. They know our laws and fear them. Rather they try to make do there, in a country still ravaged by war. ” A martyrdom that never ends. © RIPRO
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