Ukrainian refugee women on Polish soil come up against one of the most restrictive laws in Europe regarding access to abortion. And even in the case of rape, this right remains very limited. Reportage.
The ordeal of some refugees extends beyond the borders of their Ukraine at war. They thought they could find relative serenity, far from the bombardments, in a border country that is a member of the European Union; in vain. They discover the national-conservative reality of Poland and, with it, its abortion law, one of the strictest in Europe.
Many Ukrainian women, once they have found refuge in neighboring Poland, learn with amazement that it is almost impossible to have an abortion. This right has indeed shrunk considerably under the leadership of the populist right-wing Law and Justice (PiS) party, in power since 2015.
“For many Ukrainian women, this is a shock. They obviously come from a country where abortion is legal and fairly easy to access, where abortion pills are available”, testifies Kinga Jelińska, founder of Women Help Women, an international non-profit activist organization whose objective is is to facilitate access to voluntary termination of pregnancy (IVG) in Poland by medication.
In very Catholic Poland, abortion is legal until the 12e week of pregnancy when it comes to rape, incest or danger to the life or health of the mother. But, in reality, the process proves to be more difficult, particularly with regard to rape.
“No Ukrainian woman has had access to a legal abortion on this basis, to my knowledge, continues Kinga Jelińska. It’s almost impossible, because you have to go to the police, and then get a “certificate” from a prosecutor to prove the crime you’ve been the victim of, and this, within a limited time. It is an extremely cumbersome and unpleasant procedure, full of stigma: you must prove that you were raped to “deserve” an abortion. A constraint which was already a burden for the Polish women, and which is all the more so for the Ukrainian women, some of whom were violated by soldiers of the Russian army.
NGOs solicited
In Poland, organizations like that of Kinga Jelińska remain a lifeline for those wishing to terminate a pregnancy. Women Help Women, for example, sends abortion pills, thus avoiding being at odds with Polish law. Since 1er In March, the Abortion Without Borders (Aborcja Bez Granic) coalition — of which Women Help Women is a member — received no less than 397 calls for help from Ukrainian women. The majority were for obtaining abortion pills; others, for an abortion abroad, outside Poland.
“There are heartbreaking stories of rape, sexual violence. But it is also the story of uprooted people, of women who may have even wanted to be pregnant before, but because of radically different circumstances, these pregnancies become unwanted,” explains Ms.me Jelińska, insisting on the fact that “no organization asks the reason for the abortion, because it is nobody’s business”.
It must be said that before the aggression unleashed by the Kremlin, organizations like his were well known to Polish women. And for good reason: a judgment rendered in the fall of 2020 by the Polish Constitutional Court, subservient to the PiS, deemed abortion in the event of a malformation contrary to the fundamental law of the country. fetal. The highest court in the country thus paved the way for a virtual ban on this right in Poland, while this condition represented almost all cases of abortion in Poland.
Since the entry into force of the verdict, in January 2021, so-called “clandestine” abortions have exploded. The Abortion Without Borders association alone reports more than 34,000 for the year 2021. not-for-profit organizations that fully take on this responsibility, still regrets Kinga Jelińska. We have a state that does absolutely nothing about women’s reproductive health, and the only thing we have left, in the face of this oppressive system, is mutual aid and solidarity. »
There are heartbreaking stories of rape, sexual violence. But it is also the story of uprooted people, of women who may have even wanted to be pregnant before, but because of radically different circumstances, these pregnancies become unwanted.
Despair at the end of the handset
Polish feminist networks are thus solicited as never before, with this affluence that is both Polish and Ukrainian. The Polish Federation for Women and Family Planning (Federa) has a front-row seat to the plight of refugee women who want to have an abortion. An open telephone line has even been set up specifically for Ukrainian women, so that they can confide in their language. It is a Ukrainian gynecologist, originally from kyiv, who is responsible for it.
“Many of them can’t even pronounce the word rape. And they just say “you know, they did something to me… And I need an abortion, can you help me?” The stories we hear about war rapes… It’s a scale of horror that I can’t describe,” laments Antonina Lewandowska, a Federa activist. She even maintains that Ukrainian women decide not to set foot on Polish soil, preferring to terminate their pregnancy in Ukraine, despite the persistent threat of bombing. “They became pregnant and know the anti-abortion reality here, and prefer to stay in a country at war: they are terrified of being forced to carry their pregnancy to term. »
Justyna Wydrzyńska, too, sometimes hears despair at the end of the handset. This 47-year-old Polish woman and seasoned activist for the right to abortion within the organization Aborcyjny Dream Team says that, “in the first days of the war, most of the calls concerned women a few weeks pregnant who wanted to stop their pregnancy, they were in the most total uncertainty.
Then the calls from those who had been raped started coming in. ” The hardest ? For me, it is to avoid asking questions about their situation when they themselves tell of having been raped. Because it can bring up the trauma,” explains Justyna Wydrzyńska.
On the other hand, the priorities of the anti-choice lobby, which is particularly strong in Poland, are elsewhere. In recent days, letters have been sent to several hospitals in the country by the Ordo Iuris Institute to verify whether the number of abortions resulting from rape has increased in the wake of the invasion of Ukraine. The reason ? It is that “many women have also fled Ukraine to perform an abortion in Poland”, affirmed to the media Wirtualna Polska last week Katarzyna Gęsiak, who represents the fundamentalist Catholic organization and close to the PiS.
An activism that is also deployed on the ground. In March, Kaja Godek, the face of the anti-abortion movement in Poland, launched a campaign among refugees. Activists from his foundation — Życie i Rodzina (“Life and Family”) — have traveled to the Polish-Ukrainian border to distribute pamphlets which, like a warning, insist that “abortion is homicide and the worst of crimes”. The illustration in the document is just as evocative: a fetus.