Poland: Sejm votes to ease abortion law – veto by Nawrocki looms
Abortion in cases of severe foetal abnormality would be allowed again and helping with an abortion decriminalised. President Nawrocki is expected to block the bills.
Archive image · Photo: Magdalena Bielecka / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0 (cropped and resized)
Poland’s parliament on Tuesday passed two bills to ease the country’s strict abortion law. One would again allow terminations in cases of severe foetal abnormality, reversing a 2020 Constitutional Tribunal ruling; it passed 233 to 203. The second would decriminalise helping a woman obtain an abortion, currently punishable by up to three years in prison; it passed narrowly, 217 to 213.
The bills now go to the Senate, which can propose amendments but cannot block them. President Karol Nawrocki has said he would not support easing abortion restrictions, and Donald Tusk’s coalition lacks the three-fifths majority needed to override a veto. His chief of staff, Zbigniew Bogucki, accused Tusk of reviving the issue to distract from other failings.
Even if the bills become law, Poland would remain, alongside Malta, the only EU country where abortion on request in early pregnancy is not legal. The legalisation up to 12 weeks promised by Tusk’s Civic Coalition is not included. Leah Hoctor of the Center for Reproductive Rights called the bills an “incremental step forward” but said “Poland is an outlier in the European context.”