“I remember when only 50 people came to my protests in defense of women’s rights in 2016,” said Anna Sikora. “After four years, almost 2,000 people took part in the protests. Most of them also took part in the last parliamentary elections, which I called them to do.”

Sikora, a mother of two from the central Polish town of Sieradz, is a left-wing activist and local leader of the women’s protests that have swept Poland and mobilized women against the Catholic conservative Law and Justice (PiS) party, which ruled the country from 2016 to 2023. Her hopes for changes to abortion law made the party’s electoral defeat in autumn 2023 possible.

“And they, especially young women, have the right to be disappointed today,” she said.

Polish women are worried about their safety

Poland has had one of the most restrictive abortion laws in Europe since the 1990s. However, under the PiS government, the situation worsened: abortions due to severe fetal deformities were banned, and abortions are now legal only when the woman’s life or health is in danger or when the pregnancy is the result of a crime.

PiS’s policies, repressive prosecutions by the prosecutor’s office and the deaths of women denied treatment in hospitals sparked new protests by women concerned about their own safety during pregnancy.

Sikora, who recently gave birth to her second child, recalled the case of Izabela S. from the southern town of Pszczyna. The 30-year-old mother of a 9-year-old girl died of septic shock in hospital in September 2021. Doctors had refused to terminate her 22-week pregnancy, although she showed signs of miscarriage.

“I am well over 30 and was afraid that the scenario of Iza from Pszczyna could happen to me too,” said Sikora.

Abortion a central election issue

Abortion was a central issue in the 2023 parliamentary election campaign and Donald Tusk, leader of the centrist Civic Platform, promised Polish women the possibility of legal abortion up to the twelfth week of pregnancy.

This was a risky promise, not only because the incumbent president, Andrzej Duda, who is close to PiS, was against it. Tusk’s future coalition partner, the conservative electoral alliance Third Way and in particular his Catholic-conservative Polish People’s Party, also distanced themselves from the promise during the election campaign.

After the election, months of disputes in the new coalition culminated in the most conservative of four bills being submitted to parliament for a final vote. It proposed abolishing the penalty for assisting in abortions. But in mid-July, parliament rejected the bill, although the majority of the governing coalition voted in favor of it. The right-wing opposition was against it, and the governing coalition was only four votes short.

Tusk seeks to circumvent abortion law

Even before the vote, Tusk had reiterated that the safety of Polish women could still be improved under the current legal situation – for example, by preventing the use of conscience abuse clauses in hospitals and the arbitrary prosecution of abortions by public prosecutors.

In the spring, Tusk instructed Health Minister Izabela Leszczyna and Justice Minister Adam Bodnar, who is also Poland’s Attorney General, to review their competences in these matters. Immediately after the failed vote on the amendment in Parliament in July, the National Prosecutor’s Office announced that it would draw up guidelines for abortion investigations. These were published on August 9 and came into force.

The new guidelines remind investigators that rumors cannot be used as evidence in a trial, nor can a woman be accused of terminating her own pregnancy. Rather, most court cases involve criminally assisted abortion.

“Although abortion (…) is contrary to the Polish legal framework, the legislator does not have to solve this problem with criminal law alone,” says the document signed by Bodnar.

The guidelines were developed after analyzing 590 files on abortion cases. Anna Adamiak, spokeswoman for the National Prosecutor’s Office, told DW that the results had revealed a number of irregularities.

New guidelines: “A bandage for a gunshot wound”

But legal experts see little hope of real improvements in the new guidelines. “It will not change anything. It will neither reduce the number of cases nor will it lessen their repressiveness,” says lawyer Jerzy Podgorski, who has experience with lawsuits for support in abortions.

Although the document contains positive elements, many problems are not addressed, he said. For example, most abortions in Poland today are induced pharmacologically by women at home, using an abortion pill ordered online. “In such a situation, there is no one who helped the woman terminate the pregnancy,” Podgorski said. Abortion itself is not a crime under the law and this should have been clearly stated in the guidelines, he added.

“There was an opportunity to improve things, but it was not taken,” Podgorski said.

Activist Anna Sikora also believes that the guidelines are inadequate. “I am disappointed with the attitude of the Polish People’s Party, which blocked the reform together with the opposition. And these guidelines from Minister Bodnar are a plaster on a bullet wound,” she said. “Should we thank them on our knees? Oh no.”

This article was originally written in German.